With Sitá they the social banquet share.
And readers of the Arabian Nights will remember how young Bedr ed-Dín Hasan was discovered by the delicious tarts for the making of which he had been always famed.
[45] One of the signs of the Zodiac.
[46] Wrestling has been from the most ancient times a favourite sport in Persia, as it has also been among the Japanese. Due allowance must, of course, be made for the Oriental exaggeration here indulged in, of representing our hero as throwing two hundred men in succession;—still, the author is not inconsistent, for did not he, single-handed, lay about him boldly and scatter the gang of robbers in the mosque and prove more than a match for the townsfolk?
[47] I presume by the “Sun of Prophecy” is meant Muhammed. The “Court of Unity” is Heaven.
[48] This little story is evidently intended as a satire on ascetics whose notions of religious duties spring from their own foolish minds, and who are often held up to ridicule by the most eminent Persian poets and moralists.
[49] In spite of the vigilance with which women in the East are guarded from communication with lovers, it is said that men frequently gain access to harams disguised in female apparel, with or without the connivance of the “neutral personages” who are appointed to keep watch and ward over the private apartments.
[50] This recalls an incident in the Muslim legend of King Solomon’s temporary degradation, in consequence of his having fallen into the heinous sin of idolatry—a legend adapted from the Jewish traditionists—when “the wisest man the world e’er saw” became an outcast and a vagrant, and took service with a fisherman; his wages being two fishes each day.
[51] The wise and witty author of Hudibras partly expresses the same sentiment in these lines:
Man is supreme lord and master