Chapter 25

[FN#232] See Jotham’s fable of the Trees and King Bramble (Judges lxi. 8) and Nathan’s parable of the Poor Man and his little ewe Lamb (2 Sam. ix. 1).

[FN#233] Herodotus (ii. c. 134) notes that “Æsop the fable-writer ( ) was one of her (Rhodopis) fellow slaves”. Aristophanes (Vespæ, 1446) refers to his murder by the Delphians and his fable beginning, “Once upon a time there was a fight;” while the Scholiast finds an allusion to The Serpent and the Crab in Pax 1084; and others in Vespæ 1401, and Aves 651.

[FN#234] There are three distinct Lokmans who are carefully confounded in Sale (Koran chapt. xxxi.) and in Smith’s Dict. of Biography etc. art. Æsopus. The first or eldest Lokman, entitled Al-Hakim (the Sage) and the hero of the Koranic chapter which bears his name, was son of Bá’úrá of the Children of Azar, sister’s son of Job or son of Job’s maternal aunt; he witnessed David’s miracles of mail-making and when the tribe of ’Ád was destroyed, he became King of the country. The second, also called the Sage, was a slave, an Abyssinian negro, sold to the Israelites during the reign of David or Solomon, synchronous with the Persian Kay Káús and Kay Khusrau, also Pythagoras the Greek (!) His physique is alluded to in the saying, “Thou resemblest Lokman (in black ugliness) but not in wisdom” (Ibn Khallikan i. 145). This negro or negroid, after a godly and edifying life, left a volume of “Amsál,” proverbs and exempla (not fables or apologues); and Easterns still say, “One should not pretend to teach Lokmán”—in Persian, “Hikmat ba Lokman ámokhtan.” Three of his apothegms dwell in the public memory: “The heart and the tongue are the best and worst parts of the human body.” “I learned wisdom from the blind who make sure of things by touching them” (as did St. Thomas); and when he ate the colocynth offered by his owner, “I have received from thee so many a sweet that ’twould be surprising if I refused this one bitter.” He was buried (says the Tárikh Muntakhab) at Ramlah in Judæa, with the seventy Prophets stoned in one day by the Jews. The youngest Lokman “of the vultures” was a prince of the tribe of Ad who lived 3,500 years, the age of seven vultures (Tabari). He could dig a well with his nails; hence the saying, “Stronger than Lokman” (A. P. i. 701); and he loved the arrow-game, hence, “More gambling than Lokman” (ibid. ii. 938). “More voracious than Lokman” (ibid i. 134) alludes to his eating one camel for breakfast and another for supper. His wife Barákish also appears in proverb, e.g. “Camel us and camel thyself” (ibid. i. 295) i.e. give us camel flesh to eat, said when her son by a former husband brought her a fine joint which she and her husband relished. Also, “Barákish hath sinned against her kin” (ibid. ii. 89). More of this in Chenery’s Al-Hariri p. 422; but the three Lokmans are there reduced to two.

[FN#235] I have noticed them in vol. ii. 47–49. “To the Gold

Coast for Gold.”

[FN#236] I can hardly accept the dictum that the Katha Sarit Sagara, of which more presently, is the “earliest representation of the first collection.”

[FN#237] The Pehlevi version of the days of King Anushirwan (A.D. 531–72) became the Humáyun-námeh (“August Book”) turned into Persian for Bahram Shah the Ghaznavite: the Hitopadesa (“Friendship-boon”) of Prakrit, avowedly compiled from the “Panchatantra,” became the Hindu Panchopakhyan, the Hindostani Akhlák-i-Hindi (“Moralities of Ind”) and in Persia and Turkey the Anvar-i-Suhayli (“Lights of Canopus”). Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac writers entitle their version Kalilah wa Damnah, or Kalilaj wa Damnaj, from the name of the two jackal-heroes, and Europe knows the recueil as the Fables of Pilpay or Bidpay (Bidyá-pati, Lord of learning?) a learned Brahman reported to have been Premier at the Court of the Indian King Dabishlím.

[FN#238] Diet. Philosoph. S. V. Apocrypha.

[FN#239] The older Arab writers, I repeat, do not ascribe fables or beast-apologues to Lokman; they record only “dictes” and proverbial sayings.

[FN#240] Professor Taylor Lewis: Preface to Pilpay.

[FN#241] In the Katha Sarit Sagara the beast-apologues are more numerous, but they can be reduced to two great nuclei; the first in chapter lx. (Lib. x.) and the second in the same book chapters lxii-lxv. Here too they are mixed up with anecdotes and acroamata after the fashion of The Nights, suggesting great antiquity for this style of composition.

[FN#242] Brugsch, History of Egypt, vol. i. 266 et seq. The fabliau is interesting in more ways than one. Anepu the elder (Potiphar) understands the language of cattle, an idea ever cropping up in Folk-lore; and Bata (Joseph), his “little brother,” who becomes a “panther of the South (Nubia) for rage” at the wife’s impudique proposal, takes the form of a bull— metamorphosis full blown. It is not, as some have called it, the “oldest book in the world;” that name was given by M. Chabas to a MS. of Proverbs, dating from B.C. 2200. See also the “Story of Saneha,” a novel earlier than the popular date of Moses, in the Contes Populaires of Egypt.

[FN#243] The fox and the jackal are confounded by the Arabic dialects not by the Persian, whose “Rubáh” can never be mistaken for “Shaghál.” “Sa’lab” among the Semites is locally applied to either beast and we can distinguish the two only by the fox being solitary and rapacious, and the jackal gregarious and a carrion-eater. In all Hindu tales the jackal seems to be an awkward substitute for the Grecian and classical fox, the Giddar or Kolá (Cants aureus) being by no means sly and wily as the Lomri (Vulpes vulgaris). This is remarked by Weber (Indische Studien) and Prof. Benfey’s retort about “King Nobel” the lion is by no means to the point. See Katha Sarit Sagara, ii. 28.

I may add that in Northern Africa jackal’s gall, like jackal’s grape (Solanum nigrum = black nightshade), ass’s milk and melted camel-hump, is used aphrodisiacally as an unguent by both sexes. See. p. 239, etc., of Le Jardin parfumé du Cheikh Nefzaoui, of whom more presently.

[FN#244] Rambler, No. lxvii.

[FN#245] Some years ago I was asked by my old landlady if ever in the course of my travels I had come across Captain Gulliver.

[FN#246] In “The Adventurer” quoted by Mr. Heron, “Translator’s

Preface to the Arabian Tales of Chaves and Cazotte.”

[FN#247] “Life in a Levantine Family” chapt. xi. Since the able author found his “family” firmly believing in The Nights, much has been changed in Alexandria; but the faith in Jinn and Ifrit, ghost and vampire is lively as ever.

[FN#248] The name dates from the second century A. H. or before

A. D. 815.

[FN#249] Dabistan i. 231 etc.

[FN#250] Because Si = thirty and Murgh = bird. In McClenachan’s Addendum to Mackay’s Encyclopæedia of Freemasonry we find the following definition: “Simorgh. A monstrous griffin, guardian of the Persian mysteries.”

[FN#251] For a poor and inadequate description of the festivals commemorating this “Architect of the Gods” see vol. iii. 177, “View of the History etc. of the Hindus” by the learned Dr. Ward, who could see in them only the “low and sordid nature of idolatry.” But we can hardly expect better things from a missionary in 1822, when no one took the trouble to understand what “idolatry” means.

[FN#252] Rawlinson (ii. 491) on Herod. iii. c. 102. Nearchus saw the skins of these formicæ Indicæ, by some rationalists explained as “jackals,” whose stature corresponds with the text, and by others as “pengolens” or ant-eaters (manis pentedactyla). The learned Sanskritist, H. H. Wilson, quotes the name Pippilika = ant-gold, given by the people of Little Thibet to the precious dust thrown up in the emmet heaps.

[FN#253] A writer in the Edinburgh Review (July, ’86), of whom more presently, suggests that The Nights assumed essentially their present shape during the general revival of letters, arts and requirements which accompanied the Kurdish and Tartar irruptions into the Nile Valley, a golden age which embraced the whole of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and ended with the Ottoman Conquest in A. D. 1527.

[FN#254] Let us humbly hope not again to hear of the golden prime of

“The good (fellow?) Haroun Alrasch’id,”

a mispronunciation which suggests only a rasher of bacon. Why will not poets mind their quantities, in lieu of stultifying their lines by childish ignorance? What can be more painful than Byron’s

“They laid his dust in Ar’qua (for Arqua) where he died?”

[FN#255] See De Sacy’s Chrestomathie Arabe (Paris, 1826), vol. i.

[FN#256] See Le Jardin Parfumé du Cheikh Nefzaoui Manuel d’Erotologie Arabe Traduction revue et corrigée Edition privée, imprimé à deux cent.-vingt exemplaires, par Isidore Liseux et ses Amis, Paris, 1866. The editor has forgotten to note that the celebrated Sidi Mohammed copied some of the tales from The Nights and borrowed others (I am assured by a friend) from Tunisian MSS. of the same work. The book has not been fairly edited: the notes abound in mistakes, the volume lacks an index, &c., &c. Since this was written the Jardin Parfumé has been twice translated into English as “The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui, a Manual of Arabian Erotology (sixteenth century). Revised and corrected translation, Cosmopoli: mdccclxxxvi.: for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares and for private circulation only.” A rival version will be brought out by a bookseller whose Committee, as he calls it, appears to be the model of literary pirates, robbing the author as boldly and as openly as if they picked his pocket before his face.

[FN#257] Translated by a well-known Turkish scholar, Mr. E. J. W.

Gibb (Glasgow, Wilson and McCormick, 1884).

[FN#258] D’Herbelot (s. v. “Asmai”): I am reproached by a dabbler in Orientalism for using this admirable writer who shows more knowledge in one page than my critic does in a whole volume.

[FN#259] For specimens see Al-Siyuti, pp. 301 and 304, and the

Shaykh al Nafzawi, pp. 134–35

[FN#260] The word “nakh” (to make a camel kneel) is explained in vol. ii. 139.

[FN#261] The present of the famous horologium-clepsydra-cuckoo clock, the dog Becerillo and the elephant Abu Lubabah sent by Harun to Charlemagne is not mentioned by Eastern authorities and consequently no reference to it will be found in my late friend Professor Palmer’s little volume “Haroun Alraschid,” London, Marcus Ward, 1881. We have allusions to many presents, the clock and elephant, tent and linen hangings, silken dresses, perfumes, and candelabra of auricalch brought by the Legati (Abdalla Georgius Abba et Felix) of Aaron Amiralmumminim Regis Persarum who entered the Port of Pisa (A. D. 801) in (vol. v. 178) Recueil des Histor. des Gaules et de la France, etc., par Dom Martin Bouquet, Paris, mdccxliv. The author also quotes the lines:—

Persarum Princeps illi devinctus amore

Præcipuo fuerat, nomen habens Aaron.

Gratia cui Caroli præ cunctis Regibus atque

Illis Principibus tempora cara funit.

[FN#262] Many have remarked that the actual date of the decease is unknown.

[FN#263] See Al-Siyuti (p. 305) and Dr. Jonathan Scott’s “Tales,

Anecdotes, and Letters,” (p. 296).

[FN#264] I have given (vol. i. 188) the vulgar derivation of the name; and D’Herbelot (s. v. Barmakian) quotes some Persian lines alluding to the “supping up.” Al-Mas’udi’s account of the family’s early history is unfortunately lost. This Khálid succeeded Abu Salámah, first entitled Wazir under Al-Saffah (Ibn Khallikan i. 468).

[FN#265] For his poetry see Ibn Khallikan iv. 103.

[FN#266] Their flatterers compared them with the four elements.

[FN#267] Al-Mas’udi, chapt. cxii.

[FN#268] Ibn Khallikan (i. 310) says the eunuch Abu Háshim Masrúr, the Sworder of Vengeance, who is so pleasantly associated with Ja’afar in many nightly disguises; but the Eunuch survived the Caliph. Fakhr al-Din (p. 27) adds that Masrur was an enemy of Ja’afar; and gives further details concerning the execution.

[FN#269] Bresl. Edit., Night dlxvii. vol. vii. pp. 258–260; translated in the Mr. Payne’s “Tales from the Arabic,” vol. i. 189 and headed “Al-Rashid and the Barmecides.” It is far less lively and dramatic than the account of the same event given by Al-Mas’udi, chapt. cxii., by Ibn Khallikan and by Fakhr al-Din.

[FN#270] Al-Mas’udi, chapt. cxi.

[FN#271] See Dr. Jonathan Scott’s extracts from Major Ouseley’s

“Tarikh-i-Barmaki.”

[FN#272] Al-Mas’udi, chapt. cxii. For the liberties Ja’afar took see Ibn Khallikan, i. 303.

[FN#273] Ibid. chapt. xxiv. In vol. ii. 29 of The Nights, I find signs of Ja’afar’s suspected heresy. For Al-Rashid’s hatred of the Zindiks see Al-Siyuti, pp. 292, 301; and as regards the religious troubles ibid. p. 362 and passim.

[FN#274] Biogr. Dict. i. 309.

[FN#275] This accomplished princess had a practice that suggests the Dame aux Camélias.

[FN#276] i.e. Perdition to your fathers, Allah’s curse on your ancestors.

[FN#277] See vol. iv. 159, “Ja’afar and the Bean-seller;” where the great Wazir is said to have been “crucified;” and vol. iv. pp. 179, 181. Also Roebuck’s Persian Proverbs, i. 2, 346, “This also is through the munificence of the Barmecides.”

[FN#278] I especially allude to my friend Mr. Payne’s admirably written account of it in his concluding Essay (vol. ix.). From his views of the Great Caliph and the Lady Zubaydah I must differ in every point except the destruction of the Barmecides.

[FN#279] Bresl. Edit., vol. vii. 261–62.

[FN#280] Mr. Grattan Geary, in a work previously noticed, informs us (i. 212) “The Sitt al-Zobeide, or the Lady Zobeide, was so named from the great Zobeide tribe of Arabs occupying the country East and West of the Euphrates near the Hindi’ah Canal; she was the daughter of a powerful Sheik of that Tribe.” Can this explain the “Kásim”?

[FN#281] Vol. viii. 296.

[FN#282] Burckhardt, “Travels in Arabia” vol. i. 185.

[FN#283] The reverse has been remarked by more than one writer; and contemporary French opinion seems to be that Victor Hugo’s influence on French prose, was on the whole, not beneficial.

[FN#284] Mr. W. S. Clouston, the “Storiologist,” who is preparing a work to be entitled “Popular Tales and Fictions; their Migrations and Transformations,” informs me the first to adapt this witty anecdote was Jacques de Vitry, the crusading bishop of Accon (Acre) who died at Rome in 1240, after setting the example of “Exempla” or instances in his sermons. He had probably heard it in Syria, and he changed the day-dreamers into a Milkmaid and her Milk-pail to suit his “flock.” It then appears as an “Exemplum” in the Liber de Donis or de Septem Donis (or De Dono Timoris from Fear the first gift) of Stephanus de Borbone, the Dominican, ob. Lyons, 1261: it treated of the gifts of the Holy Spirit (Isaiah xi. 2 and 3), Timor, Pietas, Scientia, Fortitudo, Consilium, Intellectus et Sapientia; and was plentifully garnished with narratives for the use of preachers.

[FN#285] The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register (new series, vol. xxx. Sept.-Dec. 1830, London, Allens, 1839); p. 69 Review of the Arabian Nights, the Mac. Edit. vol. i., and H. Torrens.

[FN#286] As a household edition of the “Arabian Nights” is now being prepared, the curious reader will have an opportunity of verifying this statement.

[FN#287] It has been pointed out to me that in vol. ii. p. 285, line 18 “Zahr Shah” is a mistake for Sulayman Shah.

[FN#288] I have lately found these lovers at Schloss Sternstein

near Cilli in Styria, the property of my excellent colleague, Mr.

Consul Faber, dating from A. D. 1300 when Jobst of Reichenegg and

Agnes of Sternstein were aided and abetted by a Capuchin of

Seikkloster.

[FN#289] In page 226 Dr. Steingass sensibly proposes altering the last hemistich (lines 11–12) to

At one time showing the Moon and Sun.

[FN#290] Omitted by Lane for some reason unaccountable as usual.

A correspondent sends me his version of the lines which occur in

The Nights (vol. v. 106 and 107):—

Behold the Pyramids and hear them teach

What they can tell of Future and of Past:

They would declare, had they the gift of speech,

The deeds that Time hath wrought from first to last

* * * *

My friends, and is there aught beneath the sky

Can with th’ Egyptian Pyramids compare?

In fear of them strong Time hath passed by

And everything dreads Time in earth and air.

[FN#291] A rhyming Romance by Henry of Waldeck (flor. A. D. 1160) with a Latin poem on the same subject by Odo and a prose version still popular in Germany. (Lane’s Nights iii. 81; and Weber’s “Northern Romances.”)

[FN#292] e.g. ’Ajáib al-Hind (= Marvels of Ind) ninth century, translated by J. Marcel Devic, Paris, 1878; and about the same date the Two Mohammedan Travellers, translated by Renaudot. In the eleventh century we have the famous Sayyid al-ldrisi, in the thirteenth the ’Ajáib al-Makhlúkat of Al-Kazwini and in the fourteenth the Kharídat al-Ajáib of Ibn Al-Wardi. Lane (in loco) traces most of Sindbad to the two latter sources.

[FN#293] So Hector France proposed to name his admirably realistic volume “Sous le Burnous” (Paris, Charpentier, 1886).

[FN#294] I mean in European literature, not in Arabic where it is a lieu commun. See three several forms of it in one page (505) of Ibn Kallikan, vol. iii.

[FN#295] My attention has been called to the resemblance between the half-lie and Job (i. 13– 19).

[FN#296] Boccaccio (ob. Dec. 2, 1375), may easily have heard of The Thousand Nights and a Night or of its archetype the Hazár Afsánah. He was followed by the Piacevoli Notti of Giovan Francisco Straparola (A. D. 1550), translated into almost all European languages but English: the original Italian is now rare. Then came the Heptameron ou Histoire des amans fortunez of Marguerite d’Angoulême, Reyne de Navarre and only sister of Francis I. She died in 1549 before the days were finished: in 1558 Pierre Boaistuan published the Histoire des amans fortunez and in 1559 Claude Guiget the “Heptameron.” Next is the Hexameron of A. de Torquemada, Rouen, 1610; and, lastly, the Pentamerone or El Cunto de li Cunte of Giambattista Basile (Naples 1637), known by the meagre abstract of J. E. Taylor and the caricatures of George Cruikshank (London 1847–50). I propose to translate this Pentamerone direct from the Neapolitan and have already finished half the work.

[FN#297] Translated and well annotated by Prof. Tawney, who, however, affects asterisks and has considerably bowdlerised sundry of the tales, e.g. the Monkey who picked out the Wedge (vol. ii. 28). This tale, by the by, is found in the Khirad Afroz (i. 128) and in the Anwar-i-Suhayli (chapt. i.) and gave rise to the Persian proverb, “What has a monkey to do with carpentering?” It is curious to compare the Hindu with the Arabic work whose resemblances are as remarkable as their differences, while even more notable is their correspondence in impressioning the reader. The Thaumaturgy of both is the same: the Indian is profuse in demonology and witchcraft; in transformation and restoration; in monsters as wind-men, fire-men and water-men, in air-going elephants and flying horses (i. 541–43); in the wishing cow, divine goats and laughing fishes (i. 24); and in the speciosa miracula of magic weapons. He delights in fearful battles (i. 400) fought with the same weapons as the Moslem and rewards his heroes with a “turband of honour” (i. 266) in lieu of a robe. There is a quaint family likeness arising from similar stages and states of society: the city is adorned for gladness, men carry money in a robe-corner and exclaim “Ha! good!” (for “Good, by Allah!”), lovers die with exemplary facility, the “soft-sided” ladies drink spirits (i. 61) and princesses get drunk (i. 476); whilst the Eunuch, the Hetaira and the bawd (Kuttini) play the same preponderating parts as in The Nights. Our Brahman is strong in love-making; he complains of the pains of separation in this phenomenal universe; he revels in youth, “twin-brother to mirth,” and beauty which has illuminating powers; he foully reviles old age and he alternately praises and abuses the sex, concerning which more presently. He delights in truisms, the fashion of contemporary Europe (see Palmerin of England chapt. vii), such as “It is the fashion of the heart to receive pleasure from those things which ought to give it,” etc. etc. What is there the wise cannot understand? and so forth. He is liberal in trite reflections and frigid conceits (i. 19, 55, 97, 103, 107, in fact everywhere); and his puns run through whole lines; this in fine Sanskrit style is inevitable. Yet some of his expressions are admirably terse and telling, e.g. Ascending the swing of Doubt: Bound together (lovers) by the leash of gazing: Two babes looking like Misery and Poverty: Old Age seized me by the chin: (A lake) first assay of the Creator’s skill: (A vow) difficult as standing on a sword-edge: My vital spirits boiled with the fire of woe: Transparent as a good man’s heart: There was a certain convent full of fools: Dazed with scripture-reading: The stones could not help laughing at him: The Moon kissed the laughing forehead of the East: She was like a wave of the Sea of Love’s insolence (ii. 127), a wave of the Sea of Beauty tossed up by the breeze of Youth: The King played dice, he loved slave-girls, he told lies, he sat up o’ nights, he waxed wroth without reason, he took wealth wrongously, he despised the good and honoured the bad (i. 562); with many choice bits of the same kind. Like the Arab the Indian is profuse in personification; but the doctrine of pre-existence, of incarnation and emanation and an excessive spiritualism ever aiming at the infinite, makes his imagery run mad. Thus we have Immoral Conduct embodied; the God of Death; Science; the Svarga-heaven; Evening; Untimeliness, and the Earth-bride, while the Ace and Deuce of dice are turned into a brace of Demons. There is also that grotesqueness which the French detect even in Shakespeare, e.g. She drank in his ambrosial form with thirsty eyes like partridges (i. 476) and it often results from the comparison of incompatibles, e.g. a row of birds likened to a garden of nymphs; and from forced allegories, the favourite figure of contemporary Europe. Again, the rhetorical Hindu style differs greatly from the sobriety, directness and simplicity of the Arab, whose motto is Brevity combined with precision, except where the latter falls into “fine writing.” And, finally, there is a something in the atmosphere of these Tales which is unfamiliar to the West and which makes them, as more than one has remarked to me, very hard reading.

[FN#298] The Introduction (i. 1–5) leads to the Curse of Pushpadanta and Mályaván who live on Earth as Vararúchi and Gunádhya and this runs through lib. i. Lib. ii. begins with the Story of Udáyana to whom we must be truly grateful as our only guide: he and his son Naraváhanadatta fill up the rest and end with lib. xviii. Thus the want of the clew or plot compels a division into books, which begin for instance with “We worship the elephantine proboscis of Ganesha” (lib. x. i.) a reverend and awful object to a Hindu but to Englishmen mainly suggesting the “Zoo.” The “Bismillah” of The Nights is much more satisfactory.

[FN#299] See pp. 5–6 Avertissement des Éditeurs, Le Cabinet des Fées, vol. xxxviii: Geneva 1788. Galland’s Edit. of mdccxxvi ends with Night ccxxxiv and the English translations with ccxxxvi and cxcvii. See retro p. 82.

[FN#300] There is a shade of difference in the words; the former is also used for Reciters of Traditions—a serious subject. But in the case of Hammád surnamed Al-Ráwiyah (the Rhapsode) attached to the Court of Al-Walid, it means simply a conteur. So the Greeks had Homeristæ = reciters of Homer, as opposed to the Homeridæ or School of Homer.

[FN#302] Vol. i, Preface p. v. He notes that Mr. Dallaway describes the same scene at Constantinople where the Story-teller was used, like the modern “Organs of Government” in newspaper shape, for “reconciling the people to any recent measure of the Sultan and Vizier.” There are women Ráwiyahs for the Harems and some have become famous like the Mother of Hasan al-Basri (Ibn Khall. i, 370).

[FN#302] Hence the Persian proverb, “Báki-e-dastán fardá = the rest of the tale to-morrow,” said to askers of silly questions.

[FN#303] The scene is excellently described in, “Morocco: Its People and Places,” by Edmondo de Amicis (London: Cassell, 1882), a most refreshing volume after the enforced platitudes and commonplaces of English travellers.

[FN#304] It began, however, in Persia, where the celebrated Darwaysh Mukhlis, Chief Sofi of Isfahan in the xviith century, translated into Persian tales certain Hindu plays of which a MS. entitled Alfaraga Badal-Schidda (Al-faraj ba’d al-shiddah = Joy after annoy) exists in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. But to give an original air to his work, he entitled it “Hazár o yek Ruz” = Thousand and One Days, and in 1675 he allowed his friend Petis de la Croix, who happened to be at Isfahan, to copy it. Le Sage (of Gil Blas) is said to have converted many of the tales of Mukhlis into comic operas, which were performed at the Théâtre Italien. I still hope to see The Nights at the Lyceum.

[FN#305] This author, however, when hazarding a change of style which is, I think, regretable, has shown abundant art by filling up the frequent deficiencies of the text after the fashion of Baron McGuckin de Slane in Ibn Khallikan. As regards the tout ensemble of his work, a noble piece of English, my opinion will ever be that expressed in my Foreword. A carping critic has remarked that the translator, “as may be seen in every page, is no Arabic scholar.” If I be a judge, the reverse is the case: the brilliant and beautiful version thus traduced is almost entirely free from the blemishes and carelessness which disfigure Lane’s, and thus it is far more faithful to the original. But it is no secret that on the staff of that journal the translator of Villon has sundry enemies, vrais diables enjupponés, who take every opportunity of girding at him because he does not belong to the clique and because he does good work when theirs is mostly sham. The sole fault I find with Mr. Payne is that his severe grace of style treats an unclassical work as a classic, when the romantic and irregular would have been a more appropriate garb. But this is a mere matter of private judgment.

[FN#306] Here I offer a few, but very few, instances from the Breslau text, which is the greatest sinner in this respect. Mas. for fem., vol. i. p. 9, and three times in seven pages, Ahná and nahná for nahnú (iv. 370, 372); Aná ba-ashtarí = I will buy (iii. 109): and Aná ’Ámíl = I will do (v. 367). Alaykí for Alayki (i. 18), Antí for Anti (iii. 66) and generally long í for short . ’Ammál (from ’amala = he did) tahlam = certainly thou dreamest, and ’Ammálín yaakulú = they were about to eat (ix. 315): Aywá for Ay wa’lláhí = yes, by Allah (passim). Bitá’ = belonging to, e.g. Sára bitá’k = it is become thine (ix. 352) and Matá’ with the same sense (iii. 80). Dá ’l-khurj = this saddle-bag (ix. 336) and Dí (for hazah) = this woman (iii. 79) or this time (ii. 162). Fayn as ráha fayn = whither is he gone? (iv. 323). Kamá badri = he rose early (ix. 318): Kamán = also, a word known to every European (ii. 43): Katt = never (ii. 172): Kawám (pronounced ’awám) = fast, at once (iv. 385) and Rih ásif kawí (pron. ’awí) = a wind, strong very. Laysh, e.g. bi tasalní laysh (ix. 324) = why do you ask me? a favourite form for li ayya shayyin: so Máfish = má fihi shayyun (there is no thing) in which Herr Landberg (p. 425) makes “Sha, le présent de pouvoir.” Min ajali = for my sake; and Li ajal al-taudí’a = for the sake of taking leave (Mac. Edit. i. 384). Rijál nautiyah = men sailors when the latter word would suffice: Shuwayh (dim. of shayy) = a small thing, a little (iv. 309) like Moyyah (dim. of Má) a little water: Waddúní = they carried me (ii. 172) and lastly the abominable Wáhid gharíb = one (for a) stranger. These few must suffice: the tale of Judar and his brethren, which in style is mostly Egyptian, will supply a number of others. It must not, however, be supposed, as many have done, that vulgar and colloquial Arabic is of modern date: we find it in the first century of Al-Islam, as is proved by the tale of Al-Hajjáj and Al-Shabi (Ibn Khallikan, ii. 6). The former asked “Kam ataa-k?” (= how much is thy pay?) to which the latter answered, “Alfayn!” (= two thousand!). “Tut,” cried the Governor, “Kam atau-ka?” to which the poet replied as correctly and classically, “Alfáni.”

[FN#307] In Russian folk-songs a young girl is often compared with this tree e.g.—

Ivooshka, ivooshka zelonaia moia!

(O Willow, O green Willow mine!)

[FN#308] So in Hector France (“La vache enragée”) “Le sourcil en accent circonflexe et l’oeil en point d’interrogation.”

[FN#309] In Persian “Áb-i-rú” in India pronounced Ábrú.

[FN#310] For further praises of his poetry and eloquence see the extracts from Fakhr al-Din of Rayy (an annalist of the xivth century A.D.) in De Sacy’s Chrestomathie Arabe, vol. i.

[FN#311] After this had been written I received “Babylonian, das reichste Land in der Vorzeit und das lohnendste Kolonisationsfeld für die Gegenwart,” by my learned friend Dr. Aloys Sprenger, Heidelberg, 1886.

[FN#312] The first school for Arabic literature was opened by Ibn

Abbas, who lectured to multitudes in a valley near Meccah; this

rude beginning was followed by public teaching in the great

Mosque of Damascus. For the rise of the “Madrasah,” Academy or

College’ see Introduct. to Ibn Khallikan pp. xxvii-xxxii.

[FN#313] When Ibn Abbád the Sáhib (Wazir) was invited to visit one of the Samanides, he refused, one reason being that he would require 400 camels to carry only his books.

[FN#314] This “Salmagondis” by Francois Beroalde de Verville was afterwards worked by Tabarin, the pseudo-Bruscambille d’Aubigné and Sorel.

[FN#315] I prefer this derivation to Strutt’s adopted by the popular, “mumm is said to be derived from the Danish word mumme, or momme in Dutch (Germ. = larva), and signifies disguise in a mask, hence a mummer.” In the Promptorium Parvulorum we have “Mummynge, mussacio, vel mussatus”: it was a pantomime in dumb show, e.g. “I mumme in a mummynge;” “Let us go mumme (mummer) to nyghte in women’s apparayle.” “Mask” and “Mascarade,” for persona, larva or vizard, also derive, I have noticed, from an Arabic word—Maskharah.

[FN#316] The Pre-Adamite doctrine has been preached with but scant success in Christendom. Peyrere, a French Calvinist, published (A.D. 1655) his “Praadamitæ, sive exercitatio supra versibus 12, 13, 14, cap. v. Epist. Paul. ad Romanos,” contending that Adam was called the first man because with him the law began. It brewed a storm of wrath and the author was fortunate to escape with only imprisonment.

[FN#317] According to Socrates the verdict was followed by a free fight of the Bishop-voters over the word “consubstantiality.”

[FN#318] Servetus burnt (in A.D. 1553 for publishing his Arian tractate) by Calvin, whom half-educated Roman Catholics in England firmly believe to have been a pederast. This arose I suppose, from his meddling with Rabelais who, in return for the good joke Rabie læsus, presented a better anagram, “Jan (a pimp or cuckold) Cul” (Calvinus).

[FN#319] There is no more immoral work than the “Old Testament.” Its deity is an ancient Hebrew of the worst type, who condones, permits or commands every sin in the Decalogue to a Jewish patriarch, quâ patriarch. He orders Abraham to murder his son and allows Jacob to swindle his brother; Moses to slaughter an Egyptian and the Jews to plunder and spoil a whole people, after inflicting upon them a series of plagues which would be the height of atrocity if the tale were true. The nations of Canaan are then extirpated. Ehud, for treacherously disembowelling King Eglon, is made judge over Israel. Jael is blessed above women (Joshua v. 24) for vilely murdering a sleeping guest; the horrid deeds of Judith and Esther are made examples to mankind; and David, after an adultery and a homicide which deserved ignominious death, is suffered to massacre a host of his enemies, cutting some in two with saws and axes and putting others into brick-kilns. For obscenity and impurity we have the tales of Onan and Tamar, Lot and his daughters, Amnon and his fair sister (2 Sam. xiii.), Absalom and his father’s concubines, the “wife of whoredoms” of Hosea and, capping all, the Song of Solomon. For the horrors forbidden to the Jews who, therefore, must have practiced them, see Levit. viii. 24, xi. 5, xvii. 7, xviii. 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 17, 21, 23, and xx. 3. For mere filth what can be fouler than 1st Kings xviii. 27; Tobias ii. 11; Esther xiv. 2, Eccl. xxii. 2; Isaiah xxxvi. 12, Jeremiah iv. 5, and (Ezekiel iv. 12–15), where the Lord changes human ordure into “Cow-chips!” Ce qui excuse Dieu, said Henri Beyle, c’est qu’il n’existe pas,—I add, as man has made him.

[FN#320] It was the same in England before the “Reformation,” and in France where, during our days, a returned priesthood collected in a few years “Peter-pence” to the tune of five hundred millions of francs. And these men wonder at being turned out!

[FN#321] Deutsch on the Talmud: Quarterly Review, 1867.

[FN#322] Evidently. Its cosmogony is a myth read literally: its history is, for the most part, a highly immoral distortion, and its ethics are those of the Talmudic Hebrews. It has done good work in its time; but now it shows only decay and decrepitude in the place of vigour and progress. It is dying hard, but it is dying of the slow poison of science.

[FN#323] These Hebrew Stoics would justly charge the Founder of Christianity with preaching a more popular and practical doctrine, but a degradation from their own far higher and more ideal standard.

[FN#324] Dr. Theodore Christlieb (“Modern Doubt and Christian Belief,” Edinburgh: Clark 1874) can even now write:—“So then the ’full age’ to which humanity is at present supposed to have attained, consists in man’s doing good purely for goodness sake! Who sees not the hollowness of this bombastic talk. That man has yet to be born whose practice will be regulated by this insipid theory (dieser grauen theorie). What is the idea of goodness per se? * * * The abstract idea of goodness is not an effectual motive for well-doing” (p. 104). My only comment is c’est ignolile! His Reverence acts the part of Satan in Holy Writ, “Does Job serve God for naught?” Compare this selfish, irreligious, and immoral view with Philo Judæus (On the Allegory of the Sacred Laws, cap. lviii.), to measure the extent of the fall from Pharisaism to Christianity. And the latter is still infected with the “bribe-and-threat doctrine:” I once immensely scandalised a Consular Chaplain by quoting the noble belief of the ancients, and it was some days before he could recover mental equanimity. The degradation is now inbred.

[FN#325] Of the doctrine of the Fall the heretic Marcion wrote: “The Deity must either be deficient in goodness if he willed, in prescience if he did not foresee, or in power if he did not prevent it.”

[FN#326] In his charming book, “India Revisited.”

[FN#327] This is the answer to those who contend with much truth that the moderns are by no means superior to the ancients of Europe: they look at the results of only 3000 years instead of 30,000 or 300,000.

[FN#328] As a maxim the saying is attributed to the Duc de Lévis, but it is much older.

[FN#329] There are a few, but only a few, frightful exceptions to this rule, especially in the case of Khálid bin Walíd, the Sword of Allah, and his ferocious friend, Darár ibn al-Azwar. But their cruel excesses were loudly blamed by the Moslems, and Caliph Omar only obeyed the popular voice in superseding the fierce and furious Khalid by the mild and merciful Abú Obaydah.

[FN#330] This too when St. Paul sends the Christian slave

Onesimus back to his unbelieving (?) master, Philemon; which in

Al-Islam would have created a scandal.

[FN#331] This too when the Founder of Christianity talks of “Eating and drinking at his table!” (Luke xxn. 29.) My notes have often touched upon this inveterate prejudice the result, like the soul-less woman of Al-Islam, of ad captandum, pious fraud. “No soul knoweth what joy of the eyes is reserved for the good in recompense for their works” (Koran xxxn. 17) is surely as “spiritual” as St. Paul (I Cor. ii., 9). Some lies, however are very long-lived, especially those begotten by self interest.

[FN#332] I have elsewhere noted its strict conservatism which, however, it shares with all Eastern faiths in the East. But progress, not quietism, is the principle which governs humanity and it is favoured by events of most different nature. In Egypt the rule of Mohammed Ali the Great and in Syria the Massacre of Damascus (1860) have greatly modified the constitution of Al-Islam throughout the nearer East.

[FN#333] Chapt. viii. “Narrative of a Year’s Journey through

Central and Eastern Arabia;” London, Macmillan, 1865.

[FN#334] The Soc. Jesu has, I believe, a traditional conviction that converts of Israelitic blood bring only misfortune to the Order.

[FN#335] I especially allude to an able but most superficial book, the “Ten Great Religions” by James F. Clarke (Boston, Osgood, 1876), which caricatures and exaggerates the false portraiture of Mr. Palgrave. The writer’s admission that, “Something is always gained by learning what the believers in a system have to say in its behalf,” clearly shows us the man we have to deal with and the “depths of his self-consciousness.”

[FN#336] But how could the Arabist write such hideous grammar as

“La Il h illa All h” for “Lá iláha (accus.) ill’ Allah”?

[FN#337] p. 996 “Muhammad” in vol. iii. Dictionary of Christian Biography. See also the Illustration of the Mohammedan Creed, etc., from Al-Ghazáli introduced (pp. 72–77) into Bell and Sons’ “History of the Saracens” by Simon Ockley, B.D. (London, 1878). I regret some Orientalist did not correct the proofs: everybody will not detect “Al-Lauh al-Mahfúz” (the Guarded Tablet) in “Allauh ho’hnehphoud” (p. 171); and this but a pinch out of a camel-load.

[FN#338] The word should have been Arianism. This “heresy” of the early Christians was much aided by the “Discipline of the Secret,” supposed to be of apostolic origin, which concealed from neophytes, catechumens and penitents all the higher mysteries, like the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Metastoicheiosis (transubstantiation), the Real Presence, the Eucharist and the Seven Sacraments; when Arnobius could ask, Quid Deo cum vino est? and when Justin, fearing the charge of Polytheism, could expressly declare the inferior nature of the Son to the Father. Hence the creed was appropriately called Symbol i.e., Sign of the Secret. This “mental reservation” lasted till the Edict of Toleration, issued by Constantine in the fourth century, held Christianity secure when divulging her “mysteries”; and it allowed Arianism to become the popular creed.

[FN#339] The Gnostics played rather a fantastic rôle in Christianity with their Demiurge, their Æonogony, their Æons by syzygies or couples, their Maio and Sabscho and their beatified bride of Jesus, Sophia Achamoth, and some of them descended to absolute absurdities, e.g., the Tascodrugitæ and the Pattalorhinchitæ who during prayers placed their fingers upon their noses or in their mouths, &c., reading Psalm cxli. 3.

[FN#340] “Kitáb al-’Unwán fí Makáid al-Niswán” = The Book of the

Beginnings on the Wiles of Womankind (Lane i. 38).

[FN#341] This person was one of the Amsál or Exampla of the Arabs. For her first thirty years she whored; during the next three decades she pimped for friend and foe, and, during the last third of her life, when bed-ridden by age and infirmities, she had a buckgoat and a nanny tied up in her room and solaced herself by contemplating their amorous conflicts.

[FN#342] And modern Moslem feeling upon the subject has apparently undergone a change. Ashraf Khan, the Afghan poet, sings,

Since I, the parted one, have come the secrets of the world to

ken,

Women in hosts therein I find, but few (and very few) of men.

And the Osmanli proverb is, “Of ten men nine are women!”

[FN#343] His Persian paper “On the Vindication of the Liberties of the Asiatic Women” was translated and printed in the Asiatic Annual Register for 1801 (pp. 100–107); it is quoted by Dr. Jon. Scott (Introd. vol. i. p. xxxiv. et seq.) and by a host of writers. He also wrote a book of Travels translated by Prof. Charles Stewart in 1810 and re-issued (3 vols. 8vo.) in 1814.

[FN#344] The beginning of which I date from the Hijrah, lit.= the separation, popularly “The Flight.” Stating the case broadly, it has become the practice of modern writers to look upon Mohammed as an honest enthusiast at Meccah and an unscrupulous despot at Al-Medinah, a view which appears to me eminently unsound and unfair. In a private station the Meccan Prophet was famed as a good citizen, teste his title Al-Amín =The Trusty. But when driven from his home by the pagan faction, he became de facto as de jure a king: nay, a royal pontiff; and the preacher was merged in the Conqueror of his foes and the Commander of the Faithful. His rule, like that of all Eastern rulers, was stained with blood; but, assuming as true all the crimes and cruelties with which Christians charge him and which Moslems confess, they were mere blots upon a glorious and enthusiastic life, ending in a most exemplary death, compared with the tissue of horrors and havock which the Law and the Prophets attribute to Moses, to Joshua, to Samuel and to the patriarchs and prophets by express command of Jehovah.

[FN#345] It was not, however, incestuous: the scandal came from its ignoring the Arab “pundonor.”

[FN#346] The “opportunism” of Mohammed has been made a matter of obloquy by many who have not reflected and discovered that time-serving is the very essence of “Revelation.” Says the Rev. W. Smith (“Pentateuch,” chaps. xiii.), “As the journey (Exodus) proceeds, so laws originate from the accidents of the way,” and he applies this to successive decrees (Numbers xxvi. 32–36; xxvii. 8–11 and xxxvi. 1–9), holding it indirect internal evidence of Mosaic authorship (?). Another tone, however, is used in the case of Al-Islam. “And now, that he might not stand in awe of his wives any longer, down comes a revelation,” says Ockley in his bluff and homely style, which admits such phrases as, “the imposter has the impudence to say.” But why, in common honesty, refuse to the Koran the concessions freely made to the Torah? It is a mere petitio principii to argue that the latter is “inspired” while the former is not, moreover, although we may be called upon to believe things beyond Reason, it is hardly fair to require our belief in things contrary to Reason.

[FN#347] This is noticed in my wife’s volume on The Inner Life of

Syria, chaps. xii. vol. i. 155.

[FN#348] Mirza preceding the name means Mister and following it Prince. Addison’s “Vision of Mirza” (Spectator, No. 159) is therefore “The Vision of Mister.”

[FN#349] And women. The course of instruction lasts from a few days to a year and the period of puberty is fêted by magical rites and often by some form of mutilation. It is described by Waitz, Réclus and Schoolcraft, Páchue-Loecksa, Collins, Dawson, Thomas, Brough Smyth, Reverends Bulmer and Taplin, Carlo Wilhelmi, Wood, A. W. Howitt, C. Z. Muhas (Mem. de la Soc. Anthrop. Allemande, 1882, p. 265) and by Professor Mantegazza (chaps. i.) for whom see infra.

[FN#350] Similarly certain Australian tribes act scenes of rape and pederasty saying to the young, If you do this you will be killed.

[FN#351] “Báh,” is the popular term for the amatory appetite: hence such works are called Kutub al-Báh, lit. = Books of Lust.

[FN#352] I can make nothing of this title nor can those whom I have consulted: my only explanation is that they may be fanciful names proper.

[FN#353] Amongst the Greeks we find erotic specialists (1) Aristides of the Libri Milesii; (2) Astyanassa, the follower of Helen who wrote on androgenization; (3) Cyrene, the artist of amatory Tabellæ or ex-votos offered to Priapus; (4) Elephantis, the poetess who wrote on Varia concubitus genera; (5) Evemerus, whose Sacra Historia, preserved in a fragment of Q. Eunius, was collected by Hieronymus Columnar (6) Hemitheon of the Sybaritic books, (7) Musæus, the Iyrist; (8) Niko, the Samian girl; (9) Philænis, the poetess of Amatory Pleasures, in Athen. viii. 13, attributed to Polycrates the Sophist; (10) Protagorides, Amatory Conversations; (11) Sotades, the Mantinæan who, says Suidas, wrote the poem “Cinædica”; (12) Sphodrias the Cynic, his Art of Love; and (13) Trepsicles, Amatory Pleasures. Amongst the Romans we have Aedituus, Annianus (in Ausonius), Anser, Bassus Eubius, Helvius Cinna, Lævius (of Io and the Erotopægnion), Memmius, Cicero (to Cerellia), Pliny the Younger, Sabellus (de modo coeundi); Sisenna, the pathic Poet and translator of Milesian Fables and Sulpitia, the modest erotist. For these see the Dictionnaire Érotique of Blondeau pp. ix. and x. (Paris, Liseux, 1885).

[FN#354] It has been translated from the Sanskrit and annotated by A.F.F. and B.F.R. Reprint Cosmopoli: mdccclxxxv.: for the Kama Shastra Society, London and Benares, and for private circulation only. The first print has been exhausted and a reprint will presently appear.

[FN#355] The local press has often proposed to abate this nuisance of erotic publication which is most debasing to public morals already perverted enough. But the “Empire of Opinion” cares very little for such matters and, in the matter of the “native press,” generally seems to seek only a quiet life. In England if erotic literature were not forbidden by law, few would care to sell or to buy it, and only the legal pains and penalties keep up the phenomenally high prices.

[FN#356] The Spectator (No. 119) complains of an “infamous piece of good breeding,” because “men of the town, and particularly those who have been polished in France, make use of the most coarse and uncivilised words in our language and utter themselves often in such a manner as a clown would blush to hear.”

[FN#357] See the Novelle of Bandello the Bishop (Tome 1, Paris, Liseux, 1879, small in 18) where the dying fisherman replies to his confessor, “Oh! Oh! your reverence, to amuse myself with boys was natural to me as for a man to eat and drink; yet you asked me if I sinned against nature!” Amongst the wiser ancients sinning contra naturam was not marrying and begetting children.

[FN#358] Avis au Lecteur “L’Amour dans l’Humanité,” par P. Mantegazza, traduit par Emilien Chesneau, Paris, Fetscherin et Chuit, 1886.

[FN#359] See “H. B.” (Henry Beyle, French Consul at Civita Vecchia) par un des Quarante” (Prosper Mérimee), Elutheropolis, An mdccclxiv. De l’Imposture du Nazaréen.

[FN#360] This detail especially excited the veteran’s curiosity. The reason proved to be that the scrotum of the unmutilated boy could be used as a kind of bridle for directing the movements of the animal. I find nothing of the kind mentioned in the Sotadical literature of Greece and Rome; although the same cause might be expected everywhere to the same effect. But in Mirabeau (Kadhésch) a grand seigneur moderne, when his valet-de-chambre de confiance proposes to provide him with women instead of boys, exclaims, “Des femmes! eh! c’est comme si tu me servais un gigot sans manche.” See also infra for “Le poids du tisserand.”

[FN#361] See Falconry in the Valley of the Indus, London, John

Van Voorst, 1852.

[FN#362] Submitted to Government on Dec. 31, ’47, and March 2, ’48, they were printed in “Selections from the Records of the Government of India.” Bombay. New Series. No. xvii. Part 2, 1855. These are (1) Notes on the Population of Sind, etc., and (2) Brief Notes on the Modes of Intoxication, etc., written in collaboration with my late friend Assistant-Surgeon John E. Stocks, whose early death was a sore loss to scientific botany.

[FN#363] Glycon the Courtesan in Athen. xiii. 84 declares that “boys are handsome only when they resemble women,” and so the Learned Lady in The Nights (vol. v. 160) declares “Boys are likened to girls because folks say, Yonder boy is like a girl.” For the superior physical beauty of the human male compared with the female, see The Nights, vol. iv. 15; and the boy’s voice before it breaks excels that of any diva.

[FN#364] “Mascula,” from the priapiscus, the over-development of clitoris (the veretrum muliebre, in Arabic Abu Tartúr, habens cristam), which enabled her to play the man. Sappho (nat. B.C. 612) has been retoillée like Mary Stuart, La Brinvilliers, Marie Antoinette and a host of feminine names which have a savour not of sanctity. Maximus of Tyre (Dissert. xxiv.) declares that the Eros of Sappho was Socratic and that Gyrinna and Atthis were as Alcibiades and Chermides to Socrates: Ovid who could consult documents now lost, takes the same view in the Letter of Sappho to Phaon and in Tristia ii. 265.

Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?

Suidas supports Ovid. Longinus eulogises the (a term applied only to carnal love) of the far-famed Ode to Atthis:—

Ille mî par esse Deo videtur * * *

(Heureux! qui près de toi pour toi seule soupire * * *

Blest as th’ immortal gods is he, etc.)

By its love symptoms, suggesting that possession is the sole cure for passion, Erasistratus discovered the love of Antiochus for Stratonice. Mure (Hist. of Greek Literature, 1850) speaks of the Ode to Aphrodite (Frag. 1) as “one in which the whole volume of Greek literature offers the most powerful concentration into one brilliant focus of the modes in which amatory concupiscence can display itself.” But Bernhardy, Bode, Richter, K. O. Müller and esp. Welcker have made Sappho a model of purity, much like some of our dull wits who have converted Shakespeare, that most debauched genius, into a good British bourgeois.

[FN#365] The Arabic Sabhákah, the Tractatrix or Subigitatrix who has been noticed in vol. iv. 134. Hence to Lesbianise ( ) and tribassare ( ); the former applied to the love of woman for woman and the latter to its mecanique: this is either natural, as friction of the labia and insertion of the clitoris when unusually developed, or artificial by means of the fascinum, the artificial penis (the Persian “Mayájang”); the patte de chat, the banana-fruit and a multitude of other succedanea. As this feminine perversion is only glanced at in The Nights I need hardly enlarge upon the subject.

[FN#366] Plato (Symp.) is probably mystical when he accounts for such passions by there being in the beginning three species of humanity, men, women and men-women or androgynes. When the latter were destroyed by Zeus for rebellion, the two others were individually divided into equal parts. Hence each division seeks its other half in the same sex, the primitive man prefers men and the primitive woman women. C’est beau, but—is it true? The idea was probably derived from Egypt which supplied the Hebrews with androgynic humanity, and thence it passed to extreme India, where Shiva as Ardhanárí was male on one side and female on the other side of the body, combining paternal and maternal qualities and functions. The first creation of humans (Gen. i. 27) was hermaphrodite (=Hermes and Venus), masculum et fminam creavit eos—male and female created He them—on the sixth day, with the command to increase and multiply (ibid. v. 28), while Eve the woman was created subsequently. Meanwhile, say certain Talmudists, Adam carnally copulated with all races of animals. See L’Anandryne in Mirabeau’s Erotika Biblion, where Antoinette Bourgnon laments the undoubling which disfigured the work of God, producing monsters incapable of independent self-reproduction like the vegetable kingdom.

[FN#367] De la Femme, Paris, 1827.

[FN#368] Die Lustseuche des Alterthum’s, Halle, 1839.

[FN#369] See his exhaustive article on (Grecian) “Paederastie” in the Allgemeine Encyclopædie of Ersch and Gruber, Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1837. He carefully traces it through the several states, Dorians, Æolians, Ionians, the Attic cities and those of Asia Minor. For these details I must refer my readers to M. Meier; a full account of these would fill a volume not the section of an essay.

[FN#370] Against which see Henri Estienne, Apologie pour

Hérodote, a society satire of xvith century, lately reprinted by

Liseux.

[FN#371] In Sparta the lover was called or x and the beloved as in Thessaly or x.

[FN#372] The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself. Zeus, who became Jupiter, was an ancient king, according to the Cretans, who were entitled liars because they showed his burial-place. From a deified ancestor he would become a local god, like the Hebrew Jehovah as opposed to Chemosh of Moab; the name would gain amplitude by long time and distant travel, and the old island chieftain would end in becoming the Demiurgus. Ganymede (who possibly gave rise to the old Lat. “Catamitus”) was probably some fair Phrygian boy (“son of Tros”) who in process of time became a symbol of the wise man seized by the eagle (perspicacity) to be raised amongst the Immortals; and the chaste myth simply signified that only the prudent are loved by the gods. But it rotted with age as do all things human. For the Pederastía of the Gods see Bayle under Chrysippe.

[FN#373] See Dissertation sur les idées morales des Grecs et sur les dangers de lire Platon. Par M. Audé, Bibliophile, Rouen, Lemonnyer, 1879. This is the pseudonym of the late Octave Delepierre, who published with Gay, but not the Editio Princeps—which, if I remember rightly, contains much more matter.

[FN#374] The phrase of J. Matthias Gesner, Comm. Reg. Soc. Gottingen i. 1–32. It was founded upon Erasmus’ “Sancte Socrate, ore pro nobis,” and the article was translated by M. Alcide Bonmaire, Paris, Liseux, 1877.

[FN#375] The subject has employed many a pen, e.g., Alcibiade Fanciullo a Scola, D. P. A. (supposed to be Pietro Aretino—ad captandum?), Oranges, par Juann Wart, 1652: small square 8vo of pp. 102, including 3 preliminary pp. and at end an unpaged leaf with 4 sonnets, almost Venetian, by V. M. There is a re-impression of the same date, a small 12mo of longer format, pp. 124 with pp. 2 for sonnets: in 1862 the Imprimerie Racon printed 102 copies in 8vo of pp. iv.–108, and in 1863 it was condemned by the police as a liber spurcissimus atque execrandus de criminis sodomici laude et arte. This work produced “Alcibiade Enfant à l’école,” traduit pour la première fois de l’Italien de Ferrante Pallavicini, Amsterdam, chez l’Ancien Pierre Marteau, mdccclxvi. Pallavicini (nat. 1618), who wrote against Rome, was beheaded, aet. 26 (March 5, 1644), at Avignon in 1644 by the vengeance of the Barberini: he was a bel esprit déréglé, nourri d’études antiques and a Memb. of the Acad. Degl’ Incogniti. His peculiarities are shown by his “Opere Scelte,” 2 vols. 12mo, Villafranca, mdclxiii.; these do not include Alcibiade Fanciullo, a dialogue between Philotimus and Alcibiades which seems to be a mere skit at the Jesuits and their Péché philosophique. Then came the “Dissertation sur l’Alcibiade fanciullo a scola,” traduit de l’Italien de Giambattista Baseggio et accompagnée de notes et d’une post-face par un bibliophile francais (M. Gustave Brunet, Librarian of Bordeaux), Paris. J. Gay, 1861—an octavo of pp. 78 (paged), 254 copies. The same Baseggio printed in 1850 his Disquisizioni (23 copies) and claims for F. Pallavicini the authorship of Alcibiades which the Manuel du Libraire wrongly attributes to M. Girol. Adda in 1859. I have heard of but not seen the “Amator fornaceus, amator ineptus” (Palladii, 1633) supposed by some to be the origin of Alcibiade Fanciullo; but most critics consider it a poor and insipid production.

[FN#376] The word is from numbness, torpor, narcotism: the flowers, being loved by the infernal gods, were offered to the Furies. Narcissus and Hippolytus are often assumed as types of morose voluptas, masturbation and clitorisation for nymphomania: certain mediæval writers found in the former a type of the Saviour, and ’Mirabeau a representation of the androgynous or first Adam: to me Narcissus suggests the Hindu Vishnu absorbed in the contemplation of his own perfections.

[FN#377] The verse of Ovid is parallel’d by the song of Al-Záhir al-Jazari (Ibn Khall. iii. 720).

Illum impuberem amaverunt mares; puberem feminæ.

Gloria Deo! nunquam amatoribus carebit.

[FN#378] The venerable society of prostitutes contained three chief classes. The first and lowest were the Dicteriads, so called from Diete (Crete), who imitated Pasiphaë, wife of Minos, in preferring a bull to a husband; above them was the middle class, the Aleutridæ, who were the Almahs or professional musicians, and the aristocracy was represented by the Hetairai, whose wit and learning enabled them to adorn more than one page of Grecian history. The grave Solon, who had studied in Egypt, established a vast Dicterion (Philemon in his Delphica), or bordel whose proceeds swelled the revenue of the Republic.

[FN#379] This and Saint Paul (Romans i. 27) suggested to

Caravaggio his picture of St. Rosario (in the museum of the Grand

Duke of Tuscany), showing a circle of thirty men turpiter ligati.

[FN#380] Properly speaking, “Medicus” is the third or ring finger, as shown by the old Chiromantist verses,

Est pollex Veneris; sed Jupiter indice gaudet,

Saturnus medium; Sol medicumque tenet.

[FN#381] So Seneca uses digito scalpit caput. The modern Italian does the same by inserting the thumb-tip between the index and medius to suggest the clitoris.

[FN#382] What can be wittier than the now trite Tale of the Ephesian Matron, whose dry humour is worthy of The Nights? No wonder that it has made the grand tour of the world. It is found in the neo-Phædrus, the tales of Musæus and in the Septem Sapientes as the “Widow which was comforted.” As the “Fabliau de la Femme qui se fist putain sur la fosse de son Mari,” it tempted Brantôme and La Fontaine; and Abel Rémusat shows in his Contes Chinois that it is well known to the Middle Kingdom. Mr. Walter K. Kelly remarks, that the most singular place for such a tale is the “Rule and Exercise of Holy Dying” by Jeremy Taylor, who introduces it into his chapt. v.—“Of the Contingencies of Death and Treating our Dead.” But in those days divines were not mealy-mouthed.

[FN#383] Glossarium eroticum linguæ Latinæ, sive theogoniæ, legum et morum nuptialium apud Romanos explanatio nova, auctore P. P. (Parisiis, Dondey-Dupré, 1826, in 8vo). P. P. is supposed to be Chevalier Pierre Pierrugues, an engineer who made a plan of Bordeaux and who annotated the Erotica Biblion. Gay writes, “On s’est servi pour cet ouvrage des travaux inédits de M. Ie Baron de Schonen, etc. Quant au Chevalier Pierre Pierrugues qu’on désignait comme l’auteur de ce savant volume, son existence n’est pas bien avérée, et quelques bibliographes persistent à penser que ce nom cache la collaboration du Baron de Schonen et d’Eloi Johanneau.” Other glossicists as Blondeau and Forberg have been printed by Liseux, Paris.

[FN#384] This magnificent country, which the petty jealousies of Europe condemn, like the glorious regions about Constantinople, to mere barbarism, is tenanted by three Moslem races. The Berbers, who call themselves Tamazight (plur. of Amazigh), are the Gætulian indigenes speaking an Africo-Semitic tongue (see Essai de Grammaire Kabyle, etc., par A. Hanoteau, Paris, Benjamin Duprat). The Arabs, descended from the conquerors in our eighth century, are mostly nomads and camel-breeders. Third and last are the Moors proper, the race dwelling in towns, a mixed breed originally Arabian but modified by six centuries of Spanish residence and showing by thickness of feature and a parchment-coloured skin, resembling the American Octaroon’s, a negro innervation of old date. The latter are well described in “Morocco and the Moors,” etc. (Sampson Low and Co., 1876), by my late friend Dr. Arthur Leared, whose work I should like to see reprinted.

[FN#385] Thus somewhat agreeing with one of the multitudinous modern theories that the Pentapolis was destroyed by discharges of meteoric stones during a tremendous thunderstorm. Possible, but where are the stones?

[FN#386] To this Iranian domination I attribute the use of many Persic words which are not yet obsolete in Egypt. “Bakhshísh,” for instance, is not intelligible in the Moslem regions west of the Nile-Valley, and for a present the Moors say Hadíyah, regalo or favor.

[FN#387] Arnobius and Tertullian, with the arrogance of their caste and its miserable ignorance of that symbolism which often concealed from vulgar eyes the most precious mysteries, used to taunt the heathen for praying to deities whose sex they ignored “Consuistis in precibus ’Seu tu Deus seu tu Dea,’ dicere!” These men would know everything; they made God the merest work of man’s brains and armed him with a despotism of omnipotence which rendered their creation truly dreadful.

[FN#388] Gallus lit. = a cock, in pornologic parlance is a capon, a castrato.

[FN#389] The texts justifying or enjoining castration are Matt. xviii. 8–9; Mark ix. 43–47; Luke xxiii. 29 and Col. iii. 5. St. Paul preached (1 Corin. vii. 29) that a man should live with his wife as if he had none. The Abelian heretics of Africa abstained from women because Abel died virginal. Origen mutilated himself after interpreting too rigorously Matt. xix. 12, and was duly excommunicated. But his disciple, the Arab Valerius founded (A.D. 250) the castrated sect called Valerians who, persecuted and dispersed by the Emperors Constantine and Justinian, became the spiritual fathers of the modern Skopzis. These eunuchs first appeared in Russia at the end of the xith century, when two Greeks, John and Jephrem, were metropolitans of Kiew: the former was brought thither in A.D. 1089 by Princess Anna Wassewolodowna and is called by the chronicles Nawjè or the Corpse. But in the early part of the last century (1715–1733) a sect arose in the circle of Uglitseh and in Moscow, at first called Clisti or flagellants, which developed into the modern Skopzi. For this extensive subject see De Stein (Zeitschrift für Ethn. Berlin, 1875) and Mantegazza, chaps. vi.

[FN#390] See the marvellously absurd description of the glorious

“Dead Sea” in the Purchas v. 84.

[FN#391] Jehovah here is made to play an evil part by destroying men instead of teaching them better. But, “Nous faisons les Dieux à notre image et nous portons dans le ciel ce que nous voyons sur la terre.” The idea of Yahweh, or Yah, is palpably Egyptian, the Ankh or ever-living One: the etymon, however, was learned at Babylon and is still found amongst the cuneiforms.

[FN#392] The name still survives in the Shajarát al-Ashará, a clump of trees near the village Al-Ghájar (of the Gypsies?) at the foot of Hermon.

[FN#393] I am not quite sure that Astarte is not primarily the planet Venus; but I can hardly doubt that Prof. Max Müller and Sir G. Cox are mistaken in bringing from India Aphrodite the Dawn and her attendants, the Charites identified with the Vedic Harits. Of Ishtar in Accadia, however, Roscher seems to have proved that she is distinctly the Moon sinking into Amenti (the west, the Underworld) in search of her lost spouse Izdubar, the Sun-god. This again is pure Egyptianism.

[FN#394] In this classical land of Venus the worship of Ishtar-Ashtaroth is by no means obsolete. The Metáwali heretics, a people of Persian descent and Shiite tenets, and the peasantry of “Bilád B’sharrah,” which I would derive from Bayt Ashirah, still pilgrimage to the ruins and address their vows to the Sayyidat al-Kabírah, the Great Lady. Orthodox Moslems accuse them of abominable orgies and point to the lamps and rags which they suspend to a tree entitled Shajarat al-Sitt—the Lady’s tree—an Acacia Albida which, according to some travellers, is found only here and at Sayda (Sidon) where an avenue exists. The people of Kasrawán, a Christian province in the Libanus, inhabited by a peculiarly prurient race, also hold high festival under the far-famed Cedars, and their women sacrifice to Venus like the Kadashah of the Phnicians. This survival of old superstition is unknown to missionary “Handbooks,” but amply deserves the study of the anthropologist.

[FN#395] Some commentators understand “the tabernacles sacred to the reproductive powers of women;” and the Rabbis declare that the emblem was the figure of a setting hen.

[FN#396] “Dog” is applied by the older Jews to the Sodomite and the Catamite, and thus they understand the “price of a dog” which could not be brought into the Temple (Deut. xxiii. 18). I have noticed it in one of the derivations of cinædus and can only remark that it is a vile libel upon the canine tribe.

[FN#397] Her name was Maachah and her title, according to some, “King’s mother”: she founded the sect of Communists who rejected marriage and made adultery and incest part of worship in their splendid temple. Such were the Basilians and the Carpocratians followed in the xith century by Tranchelin, whose sectarians, the Turlupins, long infested Savoy.

[FN#398] A noted exception is Vienna, remarkable for the enormous development of the virginal bosoni, which soon becomes pendulent.

[FN#399] Gen. xxxviii. 2–11. Amongst the classics Mercury taught the “Art of le Thalaba” to his son Pan who wandered about the mountains distraught with love for the Nymph Echo and Pan passed it on to the pastors. See Thalaba in Mirabeau.

[FN#400] The reader of The Nights has remarked how often the “he” in Arabic poetry denotes a “she”; but the Arab, when uncontaminated by travel, ignores pederasty, and the Arab poet is a Badawi.

[FN#401] So Mohammed addressed his girl-wife Ayishah in the masculine.

[FN#402] So amongst the Romans we have the Iatroliptæ, youths or girls who wiped the gymnast’s perspiring body with swan-down, a practice renewed by the professors of “Massage”; Unctores who applied perfumes and essences; Fricatrices and Tractatrices or shampooers; Dropacistæ, corn-cutters; Alipilarii who plucked the hair, etc., etc., etc.

[FN#403] It is a parody on the well-known song (Roebuck i. sect. 2, No. 1602):

The goldsmith knows the worth of gold, jewellers worth of

jewelry;

The worth of rose Bulbul can tell and Kambar’s worth his lord,

Ali.

[FN#404] For “Sindí” Roebuck (Oriental Proverbs Part i. p. 99) has Kunbu (Kumboh) a Panjábi peasant, and others vary the saying ad libitum. See vol. vi. 156.

[FN#405] See “Sind Revisited” i. 133–35.

[FN#406] They must not be confounded with the grelots lascifs, the little bells of gold or silver set by the people of Pegu in the prepuce-skin, and described by Nicolo de Conti who however refused to undergo the operation.

[FN#407] Relation des découvertes faites par Colomb, etc., p. 137: Bologna 1875; also Vespucci’s letter in Ramusio (i. 131) and Paro’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains.

[FN#408] See Mantegazza loc. cit. who borrows from the Thèse de Paris of Dr. Abel Hureau de Villeneuve, “Frictiones per coitum productæ magnum mucosæ membranæ vaginalis turgorem, ac simul hujus cuniculi coarctationem tam maritis salacibus quæritatam afferunt.”

[FN#409] Fascinus is the Priapus-god to whom the Vestal Virgins of Rome, professed tribades, sacrificed, also the neck-charm in phallus-shape. Fascinum is the male member.

[FN#410] Captain Grose (Lexicon Balatronicum) explains merkin as “counterfeit hair for women’s privy parts. See Bailey’s Dict.” The Bailey of 1764, an “improved edition,” does not contain the word which is now generally applied to a cunnus succedaneus.

[FN#411] I have noticed this phenomenal cannibalism in my notes to Mr. Albert Tootle’s excellent translation of “The Captivity of Hans Stade of Hesse:” London, Hakluyt Society, mdccclxxiv.

[FN#412] The Ostreiras or shell mounds of the Brazil, sometimes 200 feet high, are described by me in Anthropologia No. i. Oct. 1873.

[FN#413] The Native Races of the Pacific States of South America, by Herbert Howe Bancroft, London, Longmans, 1875.

[FN#414] All Peruvian historians mention these giants, who were probably the large-limbed Gribs (Caraíbes) of the Brazil: they will be noticed in page 211.

[FN#415] This sounds much like a pious fraud of the missionaries, a Europeo-American version of the Sodom legend.

[FN#416] Les Races Aryennes du Perou, Paris, Franck, 1871.

[FN#417] O Brazil e os Brazileiros, Santos, 1862.

[FN#418] Aethiopia Orientalis, Purchas ii. 1558.

[FN#419] Purchas iii. 243.

[FN#420] For a literal translation see 1re Série de la Curiosité

Littéraire et Bibliographique, Paris, Liseux, 1880.

[FN#421] His best-known works are (1) Praktisches Handbuch der Gerechtlichen Medecin, Berlin, 1860; and (2) Klinische Novellen zur Gerechtlichen Medecin, Berlin, 1863.

[FN#422] The same author printed another imitation of Petronius

Arbiter, the “Larissa” story of Théophile Viand. His cousin, the

Sévigné, highly approved of it. See Bayle’s objections to

Rabutin’s delicacy and excuses for Petronius’ grossness in his

“Éclaircissement sur les obscénités” (Appendice au Dictionnaire

Antique).

[FN#423] The Boulgrin of Rabelais, which Urquhart renders Ingle for Boulgre, an “indorser,” derived from the Bulgarus or Bulgarian, who gave to Italy the term bugiardo—liar. Bougre and Bougrerie date (Littré) from the xiiith century. I cannot, however, but think that the trivial term gained strength in the xvith, when the manners of the Bugres or indigenous Brazilians were studied by Huguenot refugees in La France Antartique and several of these savages found their way to Europe. A grand Fête in Rouen on the entrance of Henri II. and Dame Katherine de Medicis (June 16, 1564) showed, as part of the pageant, three hundred men (including fifty “Bugres” or Tupis) with parroquets and other birds and beasts of the newly explored regions. The procession is given in the four-folding woodcut “Figure des Brésiliens” in Jean de Prest’s Edition of 1551.

[FN#424] Erotika Biblion, chaps. Kadésch (pp. 93 et seq.), Edition de Bruxelles, with notes by the Chevalier P. Pierrugues of Bordeaux, before noticed.

[FN#425] Called Chevaliers de Paille because the sign was a straw in the mouth, à la Palmerston.

[FN#426] I have noticed that the eunuch in Sind was as meanly paid and have given the reason.

[FN#427] Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (by Pisanus Fraxi) 4to, p. Ix. and 593. London. Privately printed, mdccclxxix.

[FN#428] A friend learned in these matters supplies me with the following list of famous pederasts. Those who marvel at the wide diffusion of such erotic perversion, and its being affected by so many celebrities, will bear in mind that the greatest men have been some of the worst: Alexander of Macedon, Julius Cæsar and Napoleon Buonaparte held themselves high above the moral law which obliges common-place humanity. All three are charged with the Vice. Of Kings we have Henri iii., Louis xiii. and xviii., Frederick ii. Of Prussia Peter the Great, William ii. of Holland and Charles ii. and iii. of Parma. We find also Shakespeare (i., xv., Edit. Francois Hugo) and Moliere, Theodorus Beza, Lully (the Composer), D’Assoucy, Count Zintzendorff, the Grand Condé, Marquis de Villette, Pierre Louis Farnese, Duc de la Vallière, De Soleinne, Count D’Avaray, Saint Mégrin, D’Epernon, Admiral de la Susse La Roche-Pouchin Rochfort S. Louis, Henne (the Spiritualist), Comte Horace de Viel Castel, Lerminin, Fievée, Théodore Leclerc, Archi-Chancellier Cambacèrés, Marquis de Custine, Sainte-Beuve and Count D’Orsay. For others refer to the three volumes of Pisanus Fraxi, Index Librorum Prohibitorum (London, 1877), Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (before alluded to) and Catena Librorum Tacendorum, London, 1885. The indices will supply the names.

[FN#429] Of this peculiar character Ibn Khallikan remarks (ii. 43), “There were four poets whose works clearly contraried their character. Abú al-Atahíyah wrote pious poems himself being an atheist; Abú Hukayma’s verses proved his impotence, yet he was more salacious than a he-goat, Mohammed ibn Házim praised contentment, yet he was greedier than a dog, and Abú Nowás hymned the joys of sodomy, yet he was more passionate for women than a baboon.”

[FN#430] A virulently and unjustly abusive critique never yet injured its object: in fact it is generally the greatest favour an author’s unfriends can bestow upon him. But to notice a popular Review books which have been printed and not published is hardly in accordance with the established courtesies of literature. At the end of my work I propose to write a paper “The Reviewer Reviewed” which will, amongst other things, explain the motif of the writer of the critique and the editor of the Edinburgh.

[FN#431] 1 For detailed examples and specimens see p. 10 of

Gladwin’s “Dissertations on Rhetoric,” etd., Calcutta, 1801.

[FN#432] For instance: I, M. | take thee N. | to my wedded wife, | to have and to hold, | from this day forward, | for better for worse, | for richer for poorer, | in sickness and in health, | to love and to cherish, | till death do us part, etc. Here it becomes mere blank verse which is, of course, a defect in prose style. In that delightful old French the Saj’a frequently appeared when attention was solicited for the titles of books: e.g. Lea Romant de la Rose, ou tout lart damours est enclose.

[FN#433] See Gladwin loc. cit. p. 8: it also is = alliteration

(Ibn Khall. ii., 316).

[FN#434] He called himself “Nabiyun ummí” = illiterate prophet; but only his most ignorant followers believe that he was unable to read and write. His last words, accepted by all traditionists, were “Aatíní dawáta wa kalam” (bring me ink-case and pen); upon which the Shi’ah or Persian sectaries base, not without probability, a theory that Mohammed intended to write down the name of Ali as his Caliph or successor when Omar, suspecting the intention, exclaimed, “The Prophet is delirious; have we not the Koran?” thus impiously preventing the precaution. However that may be, the legend proves that Mohammed could read and write even when not “under inspiration.” The vulgar idea would arise from a pious intent to add miracle to the miraculous style of the Koran.

[FN#435] I cannot but vehemently suspect that this legend was taken from much older traditions. We have Jubal the semi-mythical who, “by the different falls of his hammer on the anvil, discovered by the ear the first rude music that pleased the antediluvian fathers.” Then came Pythagoras, of whom Macrobius (lib. ii ) relates how this Græco-Egyptian philosopher, passing by a smithy, observed that the sounds were grave or acute according to the weights of the hammers; and he ascertained by experiment that such was the case when different weights were hung by strings of the same size. The next discovery was that two strings of the same substance and tension, the one being double the length of the other, gave the diapason-interval, or an eighth; and the same was effected from two strings of similar length and size, the one having four times the tension of the other. Belonging to the same cycle of invention-anecdotes are Galileo’s discovery of the pendulum by the lustre of the Pisan Duomo; and the kettle-lid, the falling apple and the copper hook which inspired Watt, Newton and Galvani.

[FN#436] To what an absurd point this has been carried we may learn from Ibn Khallikán (i. 114). A poet addressing a single individual does not say “My friend!” or “My friends!” but “My two friends!” (in the dual) because a Badawi required a pair of companions, one to tend the sheep and the other to pasture the camels.

[FN#437] For further details concerning the Sabab, Watad and

Fasilah, see at the end of this Essay the learned remarks of Dr.

Steingass.

[FN#438] e.g., the Mu’allakats of “Amriolkais,” Tarafah and Zuhayr compared by Mr. Lyall (Introduction to Translations) with the metre of Abt Vogler, e.g.,

Ye know why the forms are fair, ye hear how the tale is told

[FN#439] e.g., the Poem of Hareth which often echoes the hexameter

[FN#440] Gladwin, p. 80.

[FN#441] Gladwin (p. 77) gives only eight, omitting F ’ l which he or his author probably considers the Muzáhaf, imperfect or apocopêd form of F ’ l n, as M f ’ l of M f ’ l n. For the infinite complications of Arabic prosody the Khafíf (soft breathing) and Sahíh (hard breathing); the Sadr and Arúz (first and last feet), the Ibtidá and Zarb (last foot of every line); the Hashw (cushion-stuffing) or body part of verse, the ’Amúd al-Kasídah or Al-Musammat (the strong) and other details I must refer readers to such specialists as Freytag and Sam. Clarke (Prosodia Arabica), and to Dr. Steingass’s notes infra.

[FN#442] The Hebrew grammarians of the Middle Ages wisely copied their Arab cousins by turning Fa’la into Pael and so forth.

[FN#443] Mr. Lyall, whose “Ancient Arabic Poetry” (Williams and Norgate, 1885) I reviewed in The Academy of Oct. 3, ’85, did the absolute reverse of what is required: he preserved the metre and sacrificed the rhyme even when it naturally suggested itself. For instance in the last four lines of No. xii. what would be easier than to write,

Ah sweet and soft wi’ thee her ways: bethink thee well! The day

shall be

When some one favoured as thyself shall find her fair and fain

and free;

And if she swear that parting ne’er shall break her word of

constancy,

When did rose-tinted finger-tip with pacts and pledges e’er

agree?

[FN#444] See p. 439 Grammatik des Arabischen Vulgär Dialekts von Ægyptian, by Dr. Wilhelm Spitta Bey, Leipzig, 1880. In pp. 489–493 he gives specimens of eleven Mawáwíl varying in length from four to fifteen lines. The assonance mostly attempts monorhyme: in two tetrastichs it is aa + ba, and it does not disdain alternates, ab + ab + ab.

[FN#445] Al-Siyuti, p. 235, from Ibn Khallikan. Our knowledge of oldest Arab verse is drawn chiefly from the Katáb al-Aghání (Song-book) of Abu al-Faraj the Isfaháni who flourished A.H. 284–356 (= 897– 967): it was printed at the Bulak Press in 1868.

[FN#446] See Lyall loc. cit. p. 97.

[FN#447] His Diwán has been published with a French translation, par R. Boucher, Paris, Labitte, 1870.

[FN#448] I find also minor quotations from the Imám Abu al-Hasan al-Askari (of Sarra man raa) ob. A.D. 868; Ibn Makúla (murdered in A.D. 862?), Ibn Durayd (ob. A.D. 933) Al-Zahr the Poet (ob. A.D. 963); Abu Bakr al-Zubaydi (ob. A.D. 989), Kábús ibn Wushmaghir (murdered in A.D. 1012–13); Ibn Nabatah the Poet (ob. A.D. 1015), Ibn al-Sa’ati (ob. A.D. 1028); Ibn Zaydun al-Andalusi who died at Hums (Emessa, the Arab name for Seville) in A.D. 1071; Al-Mu’tasim ibn Sumadih (ob. A.D. 1091), Al-Murtaza ibn al-Shahrozuri the Sufi (ob. A.D. 1117); Ibn Sara al-Shantaráni (of Santarem) who sang of Hind and died A.D. 1123; Ibn al-Kházin (ob. A.D. 1124), Ibn Kalakis (ob. A D. 1172) Ibn al-Ta’wizi (ob. A.D. 1188); Ibn Zabádah (ob. A.D. 1198), Bahá al-Dín Zuhayr (ob A.D. 1249); Muwaffak al-Din Muzaffar (ob. A.D. 1266) and sundry others. Notices of Al-Utayyah (vol. i. 11), of Ibn al-Sumám (vol. i. 87) and of Ibn Sáhib al-Ishbíli, of Seville (vol. i. 100), are deficient. The most notable point in Arabic verse is its savage satire, the language of excited “destructiveness” which characterises the Badawi: he is “keen for satire as a thirsty man for water:” and half his poetry seems to consist of foul innuendo, of lampoons, and of gross personal abuse.

[FN#449] If the letter preceding Wáw or Yá is moved by Fathah, they produce the diphthongs au (aw), pronounced like ou in “bout’” and se, pronounced as i in “bite.”

[FN#450] For the explanation of this name and those of the following terms, see Terminal Essay, p. 225.

[FN#451] This Fásilah is more accurately called sughrá, the smaller one, there is another Fásilah kubrà, the greater, consisting of four moved letters followed by a quiescent, or of a Sabab sakíl followed by a Watad majmú’. But it occurs only as a variation of a normal foot, not as an integral element in its composition, and consequently no mention of it was needed in the text.

[FN#452] It is important to keep in mind that the seemingly identical feet 10 and 6, 7 and 3, are distinguished by the relative positions of the constituting elements in either pair. For as it will be seen that Sabab and Watad are subject to different kinds of alterations it is evident that the effect of such alterations upon a foot will vary, if Sabab and Watad occupy different places with regard to each other.

[FN#453] i.e. vertical to the circumference.

[FN#454] This would be a Fásilah kubrá spoken of in the note p. 239.

[FN#455] In pause that is at the end of a line, a short vowel counts either as long or is dropped according to the exigencies of the metre. In the Hashw the u or i of the pronominal affix for the third person sing., masc., and the final u of the enlarged pronominal plural forms, humu and kumu, may be either short or long, according to the same exigencies. The end-vowel of the pronoun of the first person aná, I, is generally read short, although it is written with Alif.

[FN#456] On p. 236 the word akámú, as read by itself, was identified with the foot Fa’úlun. Here it must be read together with the following syllable as “akámulwaj,” which is Mafá’ílun.

[FN#457] Prof. Palmer, p. 328 of his Grammar, identifies this form of the Wáfir, when every Mufá’ alatum of the Hashw has become Mafá’ílun, with the second form of the Rajaz It should be Hazaj. Professor Palmer was misled, it seems, by an evident misprint in one of his authorities, the Muhít al-Dáirah by Dr. Van Dayk, p. 52.

[FN#458] Calcutta (1839–42) and Boulac 134b “The Merchant’s Wife and the Parrot.”

[FN#459] This will be found translated in my “Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night,” vol. vii. p. 307, as an Appendix to the Calcutta (1839–42) and Boulac version of the story, from which it differs in detail.

[FN#460] Called “Bekhit” in Calcutta (1839–42) and Boulac

Editions.

[FN#461] Yehya ben Khalid (Calcutta (1839–42) and Boulac),

[FN#462] “Shar” (Calcutta (1839–42) and Boulac).

[FN#463] “Jelyaad” (Calcutta (1839–42) and Boulac.)

[FN#464] Calcutta (1839–42) and Boulac, No. 63. See my “Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night,” vol. iv., p. 211.

[FN#465] Calcutta (1839–42) and Boulac, “Jaafar the Barmecide.”

[FN#466] Calcutta (1839–42) and Boulac, “The Thief turned Merchant and the other Thief,” No. 88.

[FN#467] This story will be found translated in my “Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night,” vol. v., p. 345.

[FN#468] After this I introduce the Tale of the Husband and the Parrot.

[FN#469] The Bulak Edition omits this story altogether.

[FN#470] After this I introduce How Abu Hasan brake wind.

[FN#471] Probably Wakksh al-Falák=Feral of the Wild.

[FN#472] This is the date of the Paris edition. There was an earlier edition published at La Haye in 1743.

[FN#473] There are two other Oriental romances by Voltaire; viz.,

Babouc, and the Princess of Babylon.