78 COSMOS. 



velopment of language could be employed for the purpose of 

 giving animated pictures of distant regions. 



The earlier travelers of the Middle Ages, as, for instance, 

 John Mandeville (1353), Hans Schiltberger of Munich (1425), 

 and Bernhard von Breytenback (1486), delight us even in the 

 present day by their charming simplicity, their freedom of 

 style, and the self-confidence with which they step before a 

 public, who, from their utter ignorance, listen with the greater 

 curiosity and readiness of belief, because they have not as yet 

 learned to feel ashamed of appearing ignorant, amused, or as- 

 tonished. The interest attached to the narratives of travels 

 was then almost wb^lly dramatic, and the necessary and easily 

 introduced admixture of the marvelous gave them almost an 

 epic coloring. The manners of foreign nations are not so 

 much described as they are rendered incidentally discerrdble 

 by the contact of the travelers with the natives. The vege- 

 tation is unnamed and unheeded, with the exception of an 

 occasional allusion to some pleasantly-flavored or strangely- 

 formed fruit, or to the extraordinary dimensions of particular 

 kinds of stems or leaves of plants. Among animals, they de- 

 scribe, with the greatest predilection, first, those which exhibit 

 most resemblance to the human form, and, next, those which 

 are the wildest and most formidable. The cotemporaries of 

 these travelers believed in all the dangers which few of them 

 had shared, and the slowness of navigation and the want of 

 means of communication caused the Indies, as all the tropical 

 regions were then called, to appear at an immeasurable dis- 

 tance. Columbus* was not yet justified in writing to Queen 

 Isabella, " the world is small, much smaller than people sup- 

 pose." 



The almost forgotten travels of the Middle Ages to which 

 we have alluded, possessed, however, with all the poverty of 

 their materials, many advantages in point of composition over 

 the majority of our modern voyages. They had that character 

 of unity which every work of art requires ; every thing was 

 associated with one action, and made subservient to the nar- 

 ration of the journey itself The interest was derived from 

 the simple, vivid, and generally implicitly-believed relation of 

 dangers overcome. Christian travelers, in their ignorance ot 

 what had already been done by Arabs, Spanish Jews, and 

 Buddhist missionaries, boasted of being the first to see and 



* Letter of the Admiral from Jamaica, Jaly 7, 1503 : " El mundo e» 

 foco; digo que el mundo no es tan graiide como dice el vulgo''^ (Navar- 

 rete, Coleccion de Viages Esp., t. i., p. 300). 



