Oliphant says:  “Strange it is that Dante should have been compiling his Inferno, which settled the course of Italian literature forever, in the selfsame years that Robert of Brunne was compiling the earliest pattern of well-formed New English...  Almost every one of the Teutonic changes in idiom, distinguishing the New English from the Old, the speech of Queen Victoria from the speech of Hengist, is to be found in Manning’s work.”

Mandeville’s Travels.—­Sir John Mandeville, who is popularly considered the author of a very entertaining work of travels, states that he was born in St. Albans in 1300, that he left England in 1322, and traveled in the East for thirty-four years.  His Travels relates what he saw and heard in his wanderings through Ethiopia, Persia, Tartary, India, and Cathay.  What he tells on his own authority, he vouches for as true, but what he relates as hearsay, he leaves to the reader’s judgment for belief.

[Illustration:  WHAT MADEVILLE SAW. Old print from Edition of 1725.]

No such single traveler as Mandeville ever existed.  The work attributed to him has been proved to be a compilation from the writings of other travelers.  A French critic says wittily:  “He first lost his character as a truthful writer; then out of the three versions of his book, French, English, and Latin, two were withdrawn from him, leaving him only the first.  Existence has now been taken from him, and he is left with nothing at all.”  No matter, however, who the author was, the book exists.  More manuscripts of it survive than of any other work except the Scriptures.  It is the most entertaining volume of English prose that we have before 1360.  The sentences are simple and direct, and they describe things vividly:—­

“In Ethiope ben many dyverse folk:  and Ethiope is clept[13] Cusis.  In that contree ben folk, that han but o foot:  and thei gon so fast, that it is marvaylle:  and the foot is so large, that it schadewethe alle the body azen[14] the Sonne whanne thei wole[15] lye and reste hem."[16]

Mandeville also tells of a bird that used to amuse itself by flying away with an elephant in its talons.  In the land of Prester John was a valley where Mandeville says he saw devils jumping about as thick as grasshoppers.  Stories like these make the work as interesting as Gulliver’s Travels.

The so-called Mandeville’s Travels was one of the few works that the unlearned of that age could understand and enjoy.  Consequently its popularity was so great as to bring large number of French words into familiar use.  The native “againbought” is, however, used instead of the foreign “redeemed.”

[Illustration:  JOHN WYCLIFFE. From an old print.]