latter to send those notes and memoranda which he had brought home
with him.'

It happened that in prison with Marco Polo there lay a certain Pisan
writer of romances, Rusticiano by name,[32] who had probably been taken
prisoner before at the battle of Melaria (1284), when so many Pisan
captives had been carried to Genoa, that the saying arose 'He who would
see Pisa let him go to Genoa.' Rusticiano was skilled in the writing of
French, the language _par excellence_ of romances, in which he had
written versions of the Round Table Tales, and in him Marco Polo found a
ready scribe, who took down the stories as he told them, in the midst of
the crowd of Venetian prisoners and Genoese gentlemen, raptly drinking
in all the wonders of Kublai Khan. It was by a just instinct that, when
all was written, Rusticiano prefixed to the tale that same address to
the lords and gentlemen of the world, bidding them to take heed and
listen, which he had been wont to set at the beginning of his tales of
Tristan and Lancelot and King Arthur: 'Ye Lords, Emperors and Kings,
Dukes and Marquises, Counts, Knights and Burgesses and all ye men who
desire to know the divers races of men and the diversities of the
different regions of the world, take ye this book and cause it to be
read, and here shall ye find the greatest marvels.' But he adds, 'Marco
Polo, a wise and learned citizen of Venice, states distinctly what
things he saw and what things he heard from others, for this book will
be a truthful one.' Marco Polo's truthful marvels were more wonderful
even than the exploits of Arthur's knights, and were possibly better
suited to the respectable Rusticiano's pen, for his only other claim to
distinction in the eyes of posterity seems to be that in his abridgment
of the Romance of Lancelot he entirely omits the episode (if episode it
can be called) of the loves of Lancelot and Guinevere. 'Alas,' remarks
his French editor, 'that the copy of Lancelot which fell into the hands