His name was Sir John Mandeville, content,
Having seen much mirth, with small confinement;
Towards which he travelled ever since his birth,
And at last pawned his body to the earth,
Which by a statute must in mortgage be
Till a Redeemer come to set it free.
This seems very straightforward and matter-of-fact, and might stand, were it not that an equally matter-of-fact tomb, with a long Latin epitaph to the same person, was frequently noted by visitors to the church of the Frères Guillemins in Liège, until 1798, when the church was destroyed, during the troubles of the French Revolution.
Such marvels as these are thoroughly in keeping with this prototype of Munchausen, whose wildest flights of acknowledged fancy do not approach the magnificent fictions of Mandeville, who appropriated all the most stupendously tall stories of Marco Polo and other narrators of the thing that was not, and added a skyscraping superstructure of audacious inventions of his own. Modern writers, with the fear of others who have been there, may well envy Mandeville, who could write of men whose heads grew under their arms, and yet be regarded by his contemporaries as truthful; or could convincingly talk of Ethiopia, after this sort:
“In Ethiope there are such men as have but one foot, and they go so fast that it is a great marvel; and that is a large foot, for the shadow thereof covereth the body from Sun or Rain when they lie upon their backs.”
Every man his own umbrella; what a splendid ideal!