xlviii Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. 
because the deliberate utterances of such a man, treating, as he 
must have done, some of the more important Indian topics of the 
day, would have had much interest and value.* 
The harsh stroke of fortune, by which he was denied professional 
employment, was a gain to literature, for the period of thirteen 
years which elapsed before he found himself again in official 
harness produced, with other important work, the book on which 
his literary reputation chiefly depends, viz., the translation and 
editing of Marco Polo. It seems safe to prophecy a lasting 
reputation for this work, since it is hardly conceivable that editing 
could be better done, and its appearance in 1870 placed its author 
by common consent, here and abroad, in the very front rank of the 
geographers of his time. Yet its appearance was not, strictly 
speaking, a surprise. The nature and extent of the writer’s 
learning was already known by various essays on allied subjects, 
and notably by a work written for the Hakluyt Society four 
years previously, entitled Cathay and the Way Thither. This 
important work, long out of print and practically inaccessible, 
contains a fund of curious information on mediaeval Asia, and on 
the relations from earliest times between China and the West, more 
especially during the period of Chinese exclusiveness which inter- 
vened between the fall of the Mongols and the arrival on the 
scene, two centuries later, of the Portuguese and Spaniards. But 
the Hakluyt Society addresses a limited class of readers only, while 
Marco Polo , alike from the romance which still clings to the old 
traveller’s name, and from the quaint illustrations and other excel- 
* His principal biographical notices are of Major James Rennell, R.E., the 
geographer ; General A. C. Robertson ; General Sir W. E. Baker (written 
jointly with General R. Maclagan) ; General W. A. Crommelin ; General W. 
W. Greathed ; and Colonel George Thomson. The last-named officer is known 
to fame as having performed the feat which led to the fall of Ghuznee. 
Accompanied by two subalterns, under a heavy fire, he carried a bag of 
gunpowder to the gate of the fortress and blew it in, enabling our troops 
to enter. A leading newspaper, writing his obituary, stated that Thomson 
“was present at the capture of Ghuznee,” on which Yule characteristically 
comments — ‘ ‘ The fact will hardly be controverted ; we believe it is also true 
that Todleben was present at the defence of Sebastopol.” These are all in 
the Royal Engineers' Journal. A notice of Sir Arthur Phayre is in the 
R.G.S. Proceedings for 1886. There is also a very curious notice of George 
Strachan, an early Persian traveller, in the Asiatic Quarterly Review , v. 10. 
