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A Manual of English Literature, Historical and Critical (1891)
A Manual of English Literature Historical and Critical - 1891 Author:Thomas Arnold Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Prose Writers: Maundevile, Chaucer, Wyclif. The earliest known work in English prose of a secular character, " The Travels of Sir John Maundevile," dates from... more » this period. As before mentioned, the hook had been originally written in French, and afterwards translated into Latin. It was probably about the year 1360 that Sir John prepared and published an English version, also for the benefit of his own countrymen. This is a proof that about this time the knowledge of French, even among the educated classes, was ceasing to be essential or universal. The author professes not only to have traversed the Holy Land in several directions, but to have visited many countries farther east, including even India ; but, when we come to the chapters which treat of these countries, we find them filled with preposterous stories, which Maundevile, whose capacity of swallowing was unlimited, must have derived either from hearsay or from the works of travellers equally gullible with himself. When one reflects that Maundevile had as great opportunities as Herodotus, and then observes the use that he made of them, comparisons are forced on the mind not over-favorable to the English and mcdircval, as contrasted with the Greek and classical, grade of intelligence. Our author tells of the u Land of Ama- zoym," an island inhabited only by a race of warlike women; of rocks of adamant in the Indian seas, which draw to them with irresistible force any ships sailing past that have any iron bolts or nails in them; of a tribe of people with hoofs like horses ; of people with eight toes ; of dwarfs ; and of a one-legged race, whose one foot was so large that they used it to shade themselves from the sun w-ifch. The language, as used by Maundevile, appears almost precisely similar to that of Chaucer in his pr...« less