merchant Fitch wrote for merchants, and he did not write in vain. His information about the trade of the many Asiatic lands that he had visited aroused an interest in commercial development in the East which penetrated to every class of Society.
Fitch himself must have been an interesting figure in the little world in which he moved in the years immediately following his return from his travels. It is quite conceivable that at some time or another he met Shakespeare on terms of friendly intimacy. London then was quite a small place, not much more extensive than the "one square mile" which constitutes the City of London as we know it to-day. At its wine shops over the cup of sack or Gascony the citizens of the time were wont to discuss the latest news which filtered in from abroad and to listen to the experiences of those who had first-hand knowledge of foreign lands. The great dramatist, ever on the look-out for local colour, would have quickly discovered Fitch and drawn upon his vast store of out of the way knowledge for those wonderful studies of human nature which still hold a unique place in the world's literature. There is, at all events, a direct suggestion that Shakespeare was well acquainted with Fitch's story in the passage in Act I, scene 3 of Macbeth, where a character is made to say "Her husband to Aleppo gone, master of the Tiger." It was the Tiger on which Fitch and his companions voyaged to the Eastern Mediterranean, and it was at Aleppo, as has already been stated, that they disembarked preparatory to commencing their Asiatic wanderings. The commercial significance of Fitch's travels, however, completely overshadows any literary interest that they may possess. His narrative lifted the veil on the mysterious East, if less
