Brighton.
_Frozen Sounds and Sir John Mandeville_ (Vol. iii., pp. 25. 71.).--Your
correspondent M. A. LOWER says with truth, that the passage about frozen
voices was not to be found in the knight's published work; but neither
he nor any other of your contributors seems to have found the original
of it. In the _Tatler_, No. 254., the illustrious Isaac Bickerstaff
informs us that some manuscripts of Mandeville's and of Ferdinand Mendis
Pinto's, not hitherto included in their published works, had come into
his hands, from which he purposed making extracts from time to time; and
then proceeds to give us the identical story which your correspondent J.
M. G. appears to have taken for a real bit of Mandeville, in ignorance
or forgetfulness of its origin: for I cannot suppose any one so dull as
to take the passage in the _Tatler_ in sober earnest. Steele no doubt
took the story from Rabelais or Plutarch, and fathered it upon one whose
name (much better known than his works) had become proverbial as that of
a liar.