Pisa may have
belonged.

We have seen Ramusio's representation of the kindness shown to Marco
during his imprisonment by a certain Genoese gentleman who also assisted
him to reduce his travels to writing. We may be certain that this Genoese
gentleman is only a distorted image of Rusticiano, the Pisan prisoner in
the gaol of Genoa, whose name and part in the history of his hero's book
Ramusio so strangely ignores. Yet patriotic Genoese writers in our own
times have striven to determine the identity of this their imaginary
countryman![5]

[Sidenote: Rusticiano, a person known from other sources.]

39. Who, then, was Rusticiano, or, as the name actually is read in the
oldest type of MS., "Messire Rustacians de Pise"?

Our knowledge of him is but scanty. Still something is known of him
besides the few words concluding his preamble to our Traveller's Book,
which you may read at pp. 1-2 of the body of this volume.

In Sir Walter Scott's "Essay on Romance," when he speaks of the new mould
in which the subjects of the old metrical stories were cast by the school
of prose romancers which arose in the 13th century, we find the following
words:--

"Whatever fragments or shadows of true history may yet remain hidden
under the mass of accumulated fable which had been heaped upon them
during successive ages, must undoubtedly be sought in the metrical
romances.... But those prose authors who wrote under the imaginary names
of RUSTICIEN DE PISE, Robert de Borron, and the like, usually seized
upon the subject of some old minstrel; and recomposing the whole
narrative after their own fashion, with additional character and
adventure, totally obliterated in that operation any shades which
remained of the original and probably authentic tradition," &c.[6]

Evidently, therefore, Sir Walter regarded Rustician of Pisa as a person
belonging to the same ghostly company as his own Cleishbothams and
Dryasdusts. But in this we see that he was wrong.

In the great Paris Library and elsewhere there are manuscript volumes
containing the stories of the Round Table abridged and somewhat clumsily
combined from the various Prose Romances of that cycle, such as _Sir
Tristan, Lancelot, Palamedes, Giron le Courtois_, &c., which had been
composed, it would seem, by various Anglo-French gentlemen at the court of
Henry III., styled, or styling themselves, Gasses le Blunt, Luces du Gast,
Robert de Borron, and Helis de Borron. And these