THE OPINIONS OF SEVERAL EMINENT CRITICS.
In spite, however, of all these charges, there have been some great
men in all ages who have done justice to our author's merit. Among
these we may reckon the famous Vossius in his account of the Latin
historian, the great geographer Sebastian Munster, the learned
naturalist Conrad Gesner, the accurate historian Leunclavius, the
celebrated Joseph Scaliger, and many others. The learned German
critic William Schickard, in his history of the Kings of Persia,
gives our author this character: "Marco Polo, the Venetian, says he,
is a very good writer, and those things which he reports, and were
heretofore thought incredible, are now verified daily by later
discoveries." But of all who have undertaken the cause of our
author, none has done it with greater capacity, with more good will,
or better success, than Father Martini, to whom we owe the best
description of China, and who was consequently a better judge than
any other of the merit or demerit of this work. He assures us, that
there is not the least reason to doubt the truth of our author's
relations on account of the obscurity of the names of places; for,
says he, he wrote them after the Tartar pronunciation, whereas later
writers study to imitate as well as they are able the pronunciation
of the Chinese.
I will add to these but one testimony more, which is that of an
author very able to have detected him, if he had caught him in
untruths, and who was far enough from being tender of men's
reputations if he thought them to blame. The author I mean is
Athanasius Kircher, who in his account of China, confesses, that none
of the old authors have more fully or more accurately described the
remotest countries of the east than Marco Polo has done; yet he
readily admits, that there are many things in him so very dark, that
they may be in a manner styled inexplicable; but then, with great
good sense and candour, he attributes this to the author's want of
skill in geography and astronomy; and if we consider how young he was
when his father carried him into Tartary, and how little opportunity
he had of acquiring that sort of knowledge that was most necessary
for preventing those mistakes, we may easily concur in opinion with
so many eminent and learned writers, that in consideration of the
many curious and useful passages in his writings, these blemishes,
especially as they were in a manner unavoidable, may very well be
forgiven. After having thus cleared the way, we will no longer
detain the reader from the perusal of these travels, which their
author has thus digested. He first gives a succinct account of his
father's and uncle's peregrinations, and then of his own; after
which, he enters into a more particular description of the countries
and places through which they passed, and relates also such
remarkable things as he was informed of in the course of his voyages.