large as wolves. There is also a people of
India called Astomi, who dwell about the
fountains of Ganges, hairy all over like
the down that grows on leaves of trees:
they are likewise said to have no mouths.
Pliny places them in India; and others, with
more probability in the heart of Africke.
The original of this fable about them is derived
from a custom of certain Africans beyond
Senega, a branch of the river Niger. These
people, counting it a disgrace to show their
faces, gave occasion to others to say they had
no mouths.

Mr. M'Farlane, in his amusing Romance of
Travel in the East, gives an account of an
illuminated manuscript copy of Mandeville's
works preserved in the British Museum, in
which the artist has vied with the author in
the production of the most astounding forms.
Here, says Mr. M'Farlane, sprawls a Caliban
sort of Ethiopian; he is lying on his back
under a scorching sun; he has only one leg,
and that is up in the air; but the foot of that
leg is so long and so broad that it serves to
shade both body and head from its burning
rays. [Pliny mentions a race of men called
Sciapodes, on account of their sheltering
themselves under this singular kind of
umbrella; and Apollonius of Tyana heard of,
but did not see them when he was in India.]
Here again we have the lively effigies of a
man with a projecting upper lip, which looks
like the truncated trunk of an elephant,
covering and totally concealing mouth, chin,
and neck. Here are men and women without
any head at all, but with eyes in their chests,
and gasping, semi-lunar mouths in the front
of their bellies. And here our artist gives
us a picture of men that have beards as it
were cats' tails. He paints us green-faced
people, and blue-faced people; but that which
surpassed his art was to give the transition
stage of a people, described by his author,
who change from red to black. As we pass
from human form divine to the brute creation,
we find our limner or author still more
inventive. The hippopotamus is turned into
a centaur and cannibal; for, In the kingdom
of Bactria be ypotaims that dwell sometimes
on land and sometimes in water; and
are half man and half horse, and do feed on
men when they can get them.

It is but fair to Sir John Mandeville to
observe with Mr. M'Farlane that he does not
pretend to have seen with his own eyes all the
marvels he relates; but, in many cases, only
repeats information communicated to him by
men upon whose veracity he thought he could
rely. He seems also to have derived much of
his fabulous matter from Pliny and other
Roman and Greek writers; besides which, it
appears that great liberties have been taken
with his text, both in the M.S. copies and in
the printed editions of his travels. There
can be little doubt, however, that Sir John's
faith, like that of all his contemporaries, was
large and trusting. It was essentially an age
of faith. The philosophising Academies of
Greece and Alexandria had been long extinct ;
the Church interpretations of Christianity
had opened a larger, but more vague and
shadowy, world ; and the modern habits of
enquiry and ratiocination had not commenced.
Mandeville, therefore, lived at the right time
for turning geography into romance; and he
has not omitted to do so. One reads the
voyages of this great wit, says the Tatler
(No. 254), with as much astonishment as the
travels of Ulysses in Homer, or of the
Red-Cross Knight in Spenser. All is enchanted
ground and fairy-land.

It is not to be expected that a man like
Apollonius of Tyana could travel into India
without seeing many marvels and prodigies.
He hears, however, of some more wondrous
still, which he has not the good luck to behold
with his own eyes, and to which his biographer,
Philostratus, thinks entire credit should not
be given, nor yet altogether withheld, though
the Indian sage Jarchas repudiates all
knowledge of them. Nevertheless, Philostratus
conceives it necessary to describe them in
full. Among these, is the half-human beast
martichora—or mantichora, as Pliny has it—
which is of the number of quadrupeds, has
a head like a man's, is as large as a lion, with
a tail from which bristles grow of the length
of a cubit, all as sharp as prickles, which it
shoots forth like so many arrows against its
pursuers, (Life of Apollonius, book iii.,
chap. 45.) A further account of this tremendous
monster is to be found in Pliny's
Natural History, book viii., chap. 21; but,
for a concentration of all imaginable and
unimaginable horrors, take the following
rapid definition of him from Florio's Italian
Dictionary: — A wild beast in China and
India, with three ranks of teeth, cloven-footed,
face and ears like a man, bodied like a lion,
with a sting in his tail as a scorpion, a voice
sounding like a flute and trumpet together;
and covets much to feed on man's flesh.
There is something in the style of this passage
like the matter-of-fact description of an
ordinary runaway culprit, or of the person
referred to in a continental passport; yet what
a fearful idea does it give one of this many-
natured mystery of a beast, who, notwithstanding
his ghastly and incongruous features,
has a voice that speaks in music! An anomalous
creature always derives additional horror
from having a resemblance to humanity: but
the fluty-trumpet voice of the mantichora
has something in it almost pathetic and reconciling.
It makes us think that, perhaps, after
all, he has a touch of humanity within him,
as well as in his exterior aspect; that he has
been jostled and huddled, by some grim
mistake, into his irreconcileable and self-
contradictory form; that he is forced by the same
tremendous fate into acts of cruelty and
bloody longings for which he has an inward
loathing; and that, between his sanguinary
fits, he solaces himself with sweet sad tones of