Professor Bianconi, who has treated the questions connected with the Texts of Polo with honest enthusiasm and laborious detail, will admit nothing genuine in the Ramusian interpolations beyond the preservation of some oral traditions of Polo’s supplementary recollections.  But such a theory is out of the question in face of a chapter like that on Ahmad.

[16] Old Purchas appears to have greatly relished Ramusio’s comparative
    lucidity:  “I found (says he) this Booke translated by Master Hakluyt
    out of the Latine (i.e. among Hakluyt’s MS. collections).  But where
    the blind leade the blind both fall:  as here the corrupt Latine
    could not but yeeld a corruption of truth in English.  Ramusio,
    Secretarie to the Decemviri in Venice, found a better Copie and
    published the same, whence you have the worke in manner new:  so
    renewed, that I have found the Proverbe true, that it is better to
    pull downe an old house and to build it anew, then to repaire it; as I
    also should have done, had I knowne that which in the event I found. 
    The Latine is Latten, compared to Ramusio’s Gold.  And hee which
    hath the Latine hath but Marco Polo’s carkasse or not so much, but
    a few bones, yea, sometimes stones rather then bones; things divers,
    averse, adverse, perverted in manner, disjoynted in manner, beyond
    beliefe.  I have seene some Authors maymed, but never any so mangled
    and so mingled, so present and so absent, as this vulgar Latine of
    Marco Polo; not so like himselfe, as the Three Polo’s were at
    their returne to Venice, where none knew them....  Much are wee
    beholden to Ramusio, for restoring this Pole and Load-starre of
    Asia, out of that mirie poole or puddle in which he lay drouned.” 
    (III. p. 65.)

[17] Of these difficulties the following are some of the more prominent:—­

    1.  The mention of the death of Kublai (see note 7, p. 38 of this
    volume), whilst throughout the book Polo speaks of Kublai as if still
    reigning.

2.  Mr. Hugh Murray objects that whilst in the old texts Polo appears to look on Kublai with reverence as a faultless Prince, in the Ramusian we find passages of an opposite tendency, as in the chapter about Ahmad.

3.  The same editor points to the manner in which one of the Ramusian additions represents the traveller to have visited the Palace of the Chinese Kings at Kinsay, which he conceives to be inconsistent with Marco’s position as an official of the Mongol Government. (See vol. ii. p. 208.)

    If we could conceive the Ramusian additions to have been originally
    notes written by old Maffeo Polo on his nephew’s book, this hypothesis
    would remove almost all difficulty.