Excerpt from The New York Fireside Companion: A Paper for Home Circle; Pure, Bright and Interesting; The Fireside Companion Numbers Among Its Contributors the Best of Living Fiction Writers; Its Detective Stories Are the Most Absorbing Ever Published, and Its Specialties Are Features Peculiar to This
Sir John Maundeville was born at St. Albans in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and set out on his travels on Michaelmas Day, 1322. How many places he says that he visited, during an absence from home of more than thirty years, the book will tell. Rheumatic gout at last obliged him to return and rest. On his way home he showed to the Pope what he had written, in Latin, about the marvels and customs he had seen. Then, we are told, he turned his Latin book into French, and then again, in 1356, into English.
Modern criticism has made it clear that the original text was French, and only French. In the days of Maundeville Latin, French, and English were the three languages written in this country. Latin was then and long afterwards the common language of the educated, and it united them into a European Republic of Letters; French was the courtly language; English was the language of the people. John Gower, the poet, Maundeville's contemporary, rested his fame upon three books, one in Latin, one in French, and one in English. The use, therefore, of French does not prove Maundeville a Frenchman.
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