But before saying anything about his stories, I must first tell
you that after having been believed in as a real person for five
hundred years and more, Sir John has at last been found out. He
never lived at all, and the travels about which he tells us so
finely never took place.

"Sir John," too, used to be called the "Father of English Prose,"
but even that honor cannot be left to him, for his travels were
not written first in English, but in French, and were afterwards
translated into English.

But although we know Sir John Mandeville was not English, that he
never saw the places he describes, that indeed he never lived at
all, we will still call him by that name. For we must call him
something, and as no one really knows who wrote the book which is
known as The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, we may
as well call the author by the name he chose as by another.

Sir John, then, tells us that he was born in St. Albans, that he
was a knight, and that in 1322 he set out on his travels. He
traveled about for more than twenty years, but at last, although
in the course of them he had drunk of the well of everlasting
youth, he became so crippled with gout that he could travel no
longer. He settled down, therefore, at Liege in Belgium. There
he wrote his book, and there he died and was buried. At any
rate, many years afterwards his tomb was shown there. It was
also shown at St. Albans, where the people were very proud of it.

Sir John's great book was a guide-book. In those days, as we