MANDEVILLE, SIR JOHN, a physician celebrated on account of his travels, was born at St Alban's, about the beginning of the fourteenth century. He received a liberal education, and applied himself to the study of physic; but being at length seized with an invincible desire of visiting distant parts of the globe, he left England in 1332, and did not return till thirty-four years thereafter. His friends, who had long supposed him dead, did not know him when he reappeared amongst them. He had travelled throughout almost all the East, and had made himself master of a great variety of languages. In particular, he had visited Scythia, Armenia, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Media, Mesopotamia, Persia, Chaldea, Greece, Dal-
matia, and various other countries. He afterwards went to Liège, where he appears to have passed under the name of Joannes de Barbam, and died in November 1372. His design seems to have been to commit to writing whatever he had heard, read, or learned, concerning the places which he visited. Hence he has taken descriptions of monsters from Pliny, copied accounts of miracles from legends, and related fabulous stories upon the authority of authors who are now classed as mere romancers; so that many, perhaps most, of the falsehoods in his work properly belong to preceding writers, who, however much they may now be despised or disregarded, were considered as of good credit at the time when he wrote. But there does not appear to be any good reason why he should not be believed in regard to circumstances which he relates from his own observation. Mandeville was a good linguist, and wrote his Travels in Latin, from which he translated them into French, then into English, and lastly into Italian. The English edition is entitled "The Voyyage and Travaille of Ser John Maundeville, knight," London, 1568, 4to, reprinted in 1684 in the same form, and again in 1727, 8vo. The original English manuscript is in the Cotton Library. The English editions are the more valuable to us, from having been written in the language used by our countrymen three hundred years ago, when the orthography of English was so little fixed that it seems to have been a fashionable affectation amongst writers to spell the same words in the greatest variety of ways imaginable. Addison's pretended discovery of Sir John Mandeville's manuscripts, and the pleasant fiction of the freezing and thawing of several short speeches made by Sir John in the territories of Nova Zembla, must be known to most of our readers. (See Tatler, with annotations, vol. iv. No. 254, edition of 1806.)