essed our own view that in the Geographic
Text we have the nearest possible approach to a photographic impression of
Marco's oral narrative. If there be an exception to this we should seek it
in the descriptions of battles, in which we find the narrator to fall
constantly into a certain vein of bombastic commonplaces, which look like
the stock phrases of a professed romancer, and which indeed have a strong
resemblance to the actual phraseology of certain metrical romances.[15]
Whether this feature be due to Rusticiano I cannot say, but I have not
been able to trace anything of the same character in a cursory inspection
of some of his romance-compilations. Still one finds it impossible to
conceive of our sober and reticent Messer Marco pacing the floor of his
Genoese dungeon, and seven times over rolling out this magniloquent
bombast, with sufficient deliberation to be overtaken by the pen of the
faithful amanuensis!

[Sidenote: Marco's reading embraced the Alexandrian Romances. Examples.]

73. On the other hand, though Marco, who had left home at fifteen years of
age, naturally shows very few signs of reading, there are indications that
he had read romances, especially those dealing with the fabulous
adventures of Alexander.

To these he refers explicitly or tacitly in his notices of the Irongate
and of Gog and Magog, in his allusions to the marriage of Alexander with
Darius's daughter, and to the battle between those two heroes, and in his
repeated mention of the _Arbre Sol_ or _Arbre Sec_ on the Khorasan
frontier.

The key to these allusions is to be found in that Legendary History of
Alexander, entirely distinct from the true history of the Macedonian
Conqueror, which in great measure took the place of the latter in the
imagination of East and West for more than a thousand years. This fabulous
history is believed to be of Graeco-Egyptian origin, and in its earliest
extant compiled form, in the Greek of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, can be
traced back to at least about A.D. 200. From the Greek its marvels spread
eastward at an early date; some part at least of their matter was known to
Moses of Chorene, in the 5th century;[16] they were translated into
Armenian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac; and were reproduced in the verses of
Firdusi and various other Persian Poets; spreading eventually even to the
Indian Archipelago, and finding utterance in Malay and Siamese. At an
early date they had been rendered into Latin by Juliu