The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night Volume X Part 64

[FN#170] The short paper by "P. R." in the Gentleman's Magazine (Feb. 19th, 1799, vol. lxix. p. 61) tells us that MSS. of The Nights were scarce at Aleppo and that he found only two vols.

(280 Nights) which he had great difficulty in obtaining leave to copy. He also noticed (in 1771) a MS., said to be complete, in the Vatican and another in the "King's Library" (Bibliotheque Nationale), Paris.

[FN#171] Aleppo has been happy in finding such monographers as Russell and Maundrell while poor Damascus fell into the hands of Mr. Missionary Porter, and suffered accordingly.

[FN#172] Vol. vi. Appendix, p.452.

[FN#173] The numbers, however, vary with the Editions of Galland: some end the formula with Night cxcvii; others with the ccx.x.xvi.

: I adopt that of the De Sacy Edition.

[FN#174] Contes Persans, suivis des Contes Turcs. Paris; Bechet Aine, 1826.

[FN#175] In the old translation we have "eighteen hundred years since the prophet Solomon died," (B.C. 975) = A.D. 825.

[FN#176] Meaning the era of the Seleucides. Dr. Jonathan Scott shows (vol. ii. 324) that A.H. 653 and A.D. 1255 would correspond with 1557 of that epoch; so that the scribe has here made a little mistake of 5,763 years. Ex uno disce.

[FN#177] The Sat.u.r.day Review (Jan. 2nd '86) writes, "Captain Burton has fallen into a mistake by not distinguis.h.i.+ng between the names of the by no means identical Caliphs Al-Muntasir and Al-Mustansir." Quite true: it was an ugly confusion of the melancholy madman and parricide with one of the best and wisest of the Caliphs. I can explain (not extenuate) my mistake only by a misprint in Al-Siyuti (p. 554).

[FN#178] In the Galland MS. and the Bresl. Edit. (ii. 253), we find the Barber saying that the Caliph (Al-Mustansir) was at that time (yaumaizin) in Baghdad, and this has been held to imply that the Caliphate had fallen. But such conjecture is evidently based upon insufficient grounds.

[FN#179] De Sacy makes the "Kalandar" order originate in A.D.

1150, but the Shaykh Sharif bu Ali Kalandar died in A.D. 1323-24.

In Sind the first Kalandar, Osman-i-Marwandi surnamed Lal Shahbaz, the Red Goshawk, from one of his miracles, died and was buried at Sehwan in A D. 1274: see my "History of Sindh" chapt.

viii. for details. The dates therefore run wild.

[FN#180] In this same tale H. H. Wilson observes that the t.i.tle of Sultan of Egypt was not a.s.sumed before the middle of the xiith century.

[FN#181] Popularly called Vidyanagar of the Narsingha.

[FN#182] Time-measurers are of very ancient date. The Greeks had clepsydrae and the Romans gnomons, portable and ring-shaped, besides large standing town-dials as at Aquileja and San Sabba near Trieste. The "Saracens" were the perfecters of the clepsydra: Bosseret (p. 16) and the Chronicon Turense (Beckmann ii. 340 et seq.) describe the water-clock sent by Al-Ras.h.i.+d to Karl the Great as a kind of "c.o.c.koo-clock." Twelve doors in the dial opened successively and little b.a.l.l.s dropping on brazen bells told the hour: at noon a dozen mounted knights paraded the face and closed the portals. Trithonius mentions an horologium presented in A.D. 1232 by Al-Malik al-Kamil the Ayyubite Soldan to the Emperor Frederick II: like the Strasbourg and Padua clocks it struck the hours, told the day, month and year, showed the phases of the moon, and registered the position of the sun and the planets. Towards the end of the fifteenth century Gaspar Visconti mentions in a sonnet the watch proper (certi orologii piccioli e portativi); and the "animated eggs" of Nurembourg became famous. The earliest English watch (Sir Ashton Lever's) dates from 1541: and in 1544 the portable chronometer became common in France.

[FN#183] An ill.u.s.trated History of Arms and Armour etc. (p. 59); London: Bell and Sons, 1877. The best edition is the Guide des Amateurs d'Armes, Paris: Renouard, 1879.

[FN#184] Chapt. iv. Dr. Gustav Oppert "On the Weapons etc. of the Ancient Hindus;" London: Trubner and Co., 1880. :

[FN#185] I have given other details on this subject in pp. 631- 637 of "Camoens, his Life and his Lusiads."

[FN#186] The morbi venerei amongst the Romans are obscure because "whilst the satirists deride them the physicians are silent."

Celsus, however, names (De obscenarum partium vitiis, lib.

xviii.) inflammatio coleorum (swelled t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e), tubercula glandem (warts on the glans p.e.n.i.s), cancri carbunculi (chancre or shanker) and a few others. The rubigo is noticed as a lues venerea by Servius in Virg. Georg.

[FN#187] According to David Forbes, the Peruvians believed that syphilis arose from connection of man and alpaca; and an old law forbade bachelors to keep these animals in the house. Francks explains by the introduction of syphilis wooden figures found in the Chinchas guano; these represented men with a cord round the neck or a serpent devouring the genitals.

[FN#188] They appeared before the gates of Paris in the summer of 1427, not "about July, 1422": in Eastern Europe, however, they date from a much earlier epoch. Sir J. Gilbert's famous picture has one grand fault, the men walk and the women ride: in real life the reverse would be the case.

[FN#189] Rabelais ii. c. 30.

[FN#190] I may be allowed to note that syphilis does not confine itself to man: a charger infected with it was pointed out to me at Baroda by my late friend, Dr. Arnott (18th Regiment, Bombay N.I.) and Tangier showed me some noticeable cases of this hippic syphilis, which has been studied in Hungary. Eastern peoples have a practice of "pa.s.sing on" venereal and other diseases, and transmission is supposed to cure the patient; for instance a virgin heals (and catches) gonorrh?a. Syphilis varies greatly with climate. In Persia it is said to be propagated without contact: in Abyssinia it is often fatal and in Egypt it is readily cured by sand baths and sulphur-unguents. Lastly in lands like Unyamwezi, where mercurials are wholly unknown, I never saw caries of the nasal or facial bones.

[FN#191] For another account of the transplanter and the casuistical questions to which coffee gave rise, see my "First Footsteps in East Africa" (p. 76).

[FN#192] The first mention of coffee proper (not of Kahwah or old wine in vol. ii. 260) is in Night cdxxvi. vol. v. 169, where the coffee-maker is called Kahwahjiyyah, a mongrel term showing the modern date of the pa.s.sage in Ali the Cairene. As the work advances notices become thicker, e.g.

in Night dccclxvi. where Ali Nur al-Din and the Frank King's daughter seems to be a modernisation of the story "Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat" (vol. iv. 29); and in Abu Kir and Abu Sir (Nights cmx.x.x.

and cmx.x.xvi.) where coffee is drunk with sherbet after present fas.h.i.+on. The use culminates in Kamar al-Zaman II. where it is mentioned six times (Nights cmlxvi. cmlxx. cmlxxi. twice; cmlxxiv.

and cmlxxvii.), as being drunk after the dawn-breakfast and following the meal as a matter of course. The last notices are in Abdullah bin Fazil, Nights cmlxxviii. and cmlxxix.

[FN#193] It has been suggested that j.a.panese tobacco is an indigenous growth and sundry modern travellers in China contend that the potato and the maize, both white and yellow, have there been cultivated from time immemorial.

[FN#194] For these see my "City of the Saints," p. 136.

[FN#195] Lit. meaning smoke: hence the Arabic "Dukhan," with the same signification.

[FN#196] Unhappily the book is known only by name: for years I have vainly troubled friends and correspondents to hunt for a copy. Yet I am sanguine enough to think that some day we shall succeed: Mr. Sidney Churchill, of Teheran, is ever on the look-out.

[FN#197] In -- 3 I shall suggest that this tale also is mentioned by Al-Mas'udi.

[FN#198] I have extracted it from many books, especially from Hoeffer's Biographie Generale, Paris, Firmin Didot, mdccclvii.; Biographie Universelle, Paris, Didot, 1816, etc. etc. All are taken from the work of M. de Boze, his "Bozzy."

[FN#199] As learning a language is an affair of pure memory, almost without other exercise of the mental faculties, it should be a.s.sisted by the ear and the tongue as well as the eyes. I would invariably make pupils talk, during lessons, Latin and Greek, no matter how badly at first; but unfortunately I should have to begin with teaching the pedants who, as a cla.s.s, are far more unwilling and unready to learn than are those they teach.

[FN#200] The late Dean Stanley was notably trapped by the wily Greek who had only political purposes in view. In religions as a rule the minimum of difference breeds the maximum of disputation, dislike and disgust.

[FN#201] See in Trebutien (Avertiss.e.m.e.nt iii.) how Baron von Hammer escaped drowning by the blessing of The Nights.

[FN#202] He signs his name to the Discours pour servir de Preface.

[FN#203] I need not trouble the reader with their t.i.tles, which fill up nearly a column and a half in M. Hoeffer. His collection of maxims from Arabic, Persian and Turkish authors appeared in English in 1695.

[FN#204] Galland's version was published in 1704-1717 in 12 vols.

12mo., (Hoeffer's Biographie; Gra.s.se's Tresor de Livres rares and Encyclop. Britannica, ixth Edit.)

[FN#205] See also Leigh Hunt "The Book of the Thousand Nights and one Night," etc., etc. London and Westminster Review Art. iii., No. 1xiv. mentioned in Lane, iii., 746.

[FN#206] Edition of 1856 vol. xv.

[FN#207] To France England also owes her first translation of the Koran, a poor and mean version by Andrew Ross of that made from the Arabic (No. iv.) by Andre du Reyer, Consul de France for Egypt. It kept the field till ousted in 1734 by the learned lawyer George Sale whose conscientious work, including Preliminary Discourse and Notes (4to London), brought him the ill-fame of having "turned Turk."

[FN#208] Catalogue of Printed Books, 1884, p. 159, col. i. I am ashamed to state this default in the British Museum, concerning which Englishmen are apt to boast and which so carefully mulcts modern authors in unpaid copies. But it is only a slight specimen of the sad state of art and literature in England, neglected equally by Conservatives, Liberals and Radicals. What has been done for the endowment of research? What is our equivalent for the Prix de Rome? Since the death of Dr. Birch, who can fairly deal with a Demotic papyrus? Contrast the Societe Anthropologique and its palace and professors in Paris with our "Inst.i.tute" au second in a corner of Hanover Square and its skulls in the cellar!

[FN#209] Art. vii. pp. 139-168, "On the Arabian Nights and translators, Weil, Torrens and Lane (vol. i.) with the Essai of A. Loisseleur Deslongchamps." The Foreign Quarterly Review, vol.

xxiv., Oct. 1839-Jan. 1840. London, Black and Armstrong, 1840.

[FN#210] Introduction to his Collection "Tales of the East," 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1812. He was the first to point out the resemblance between the introductory adventures of Shahryar and Shah Zaman and those of Astolfo and Giacondo in the Orlando Furioso (Canto xxviii.). M. E. Leveque in Les Mythes et les Legendes de l'Inde et la Perse (Paris, 1880) gives French versions of the Arabian and Italian narratives, side by side in p. 543 ff. (Clouston).

[FN#211] Not.i.tiae Codicis MI. Noctium. Dr. Pusey studied Arabic to familiarise himself with Hebrew, and was very different from his predecessor at Oxford in my day, who, when applied to for instruction in Arabic, refused to lecture except to a cla.s.s.

[FN#212] This nephew was the author of "Recueil des Rits et Ceremonies des Pilgrimages de La Mecque," etc. etc. Paris and Amsterdam, 1754, in 12mo.

[FN#213] The concluding part did not appear, I have said, till 1717: his "Comes et Fables Indiennes de Bidpa et de Lokman,"