Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 2).djvu/158

 Bell was, moreover, informed by the Chinese that this wall was completed within the space of five years, every sixth man in the empire having been compelled to work at it or find a substitute. But if the date of its erection is altogether uncertain, we may very well be permitted to indulge our skepticism respecting such circumstances as tend to increase the marvellousness of the undertaking. It is far more probable that it is the work of ages, and that numerous and long interruptions occurred in the prosecution of the design. With respect to its utility, I likewise dissent altogether from the opinion of our traveller, who, in comparing it with the pyramids, styles the latter "a work of vanity." Had Bell believed, as I do, that the pyramids were temples, he would, however, have been the last man in the world to have thus characterized them; but with respect to the long wall, it may be proved to have been not only useless, but pernicious, since the imaginary security it afforded encouraged those unwarlike habits to which the Chinese are naturally addicted; and thus, when the Tartars overleaped this con-*

miles.—(History, vol. iv. p. 361.) Du Pauw, an ingenious but conceited and coxcombical writer, makes no objection to the antiquity of the work, but reduces its length to about four hundred and fifty miles; and this without citing any authority, or even stating his reasons, except that he does not choose to consider the western branch, which, he tells us, is built of earth, worthy the name of a wall.—(Recherch. Phil. sur les Egypt. et Chin. tom. ii. p. 77-79.) For my own part, I am inclined to agree with those writers who think it an entirely modern work, erected since the thirteenth century; for the silence of Marco Polo appears to me absolutely decisive. Du Pauw's supposition that he could have entered China from Mongolia, that is, passed through the wall, and lived eighteen years in the country, which he traversed in every direction, without once hearing of its existence, is too absurd even for refutation. That he abstained from describing it, lest he should excite a suspicion of the truth of his narrative, though somewhat more probable perhaps, does not upon the whole seem credible. If it existed in his time, I can account for his silence, or rather for the absence of all mention of it in his travels, as they at present exist, only by supposing that the passage in which this extraordinary work was alluded to, was, like many other passages, omitted from ignorant incredulity by transcribers, and so lost. Thus, too, we may account for no mention of tea being found in his travels.]
 * [Footnote: the date of its construction, and assigns it a length of fifteen hundred