Obituary Notices. 
xlix 
lences of the volume, appealed to a far wider circle. Not the least 
among the merits and attractions of this famous book is the style of 
the translation itself. It is archaic, and yet living, and instinct 
with the very spirit of the old Venetian. The translator has lived 
so long with him and his contemporaries that, while always his 
editor, and wielding the accumulated knowledge and diacritic 
faculty of these later days, he is in intimate sympathy with these 
brethren five hundred years his juniors. How thorough-going the 
intimacy, is sufficiently shown by the preface, written in fourteenth- 
century French, to the second edition, and which some matter-of-fact 
readers, though greatly puzzled, are said not to have discovered to 
be a jeu d’ esprit. 
A fashionable London lady, otherwise imperfectly posted, once 
addressed Sir Henry Taylor as “Mr Van Arteveldt;” and Colonel 
Yule’s popular identification with his hero was hardly less complete, 
and he enjoyed it, and often signed occasional letters to the papers 
with the initials “ M. P. V.” (or “ Marcus Paulus Venetus ”). 
But beyond even this spirit of discriminating sympathy, as giving 
value to these works, were his remarkable thoroughness and accu- 
racy, the outcome of a scrupulous and uncompromising honesty, and 
an “infinite capacity for taking pains.” And with sympathy, accu- 
racy, and memory — and Colonel Yule had a marvellous memory — 
the diligent scholar is already far on his way. 
It is characteristic of him that he takes a personal satisfaction in 
rehabilitating the reputation for accuracy, and anyhow the truthful- 
ness of intention, not only of the great “ Marco Milione,” hut of 
such lesser lights as Friar Odoric, Marignolli, and others, among the 
medisevals ; while with equal shrewdness and generosity he defends 
the Abbe Hue against the strictures of Prejevalski,* reasoning 
acutely enough that his amusing and phenomenal lack of science 
was no proof of had faith or dishonesty. For all these travellers, 
as workers in his own Fach , have his special sympathy, and he, 
with a wider grasp than others of their special difficulties, is the 
more ready to make allowance for them. He had a strong feeling, 
not only that all such work should he done as well as possible, but 
* Mongolia , &c., by Lieutenant-Colonel N. Prejevalski. Translated 
from tlie Russian by E. D. Morgan, with introduction and notes by Colonel 
Yule. 
