[296] The Sham ha-maphrash, or Nomen tetragrammaton—see the note on page 163.
[297] Rev. S. Baring-Gould’s Lost and Hostile Gospels, pp. 77, 78.
[298] See the old English translation, from the French, by Lord Berners, The Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux, ably edited by Mr. Sidney L. Lee for the Early English Text Society, 1887, p. 153.
[299] In the Catalogue des Manuscrits et Xylographes Orientaux de la Bibliothèque Imperiale Publique de St. Petersburg, 1852, p. 410, this tale is described as a separate romance: ‘Histoire de Khavershah et de Mihr et Máh, ou de Roi de l’Orient, et du Soleil et de la Lune’; the only variations being that in place of the devotee is a philosopher called Abid; and Mukhtarí is the name of the minister of the King of Maghrab, the father of the original of the picture.—There are several mystical and erotic poems in Hindí also entitled Mihr ú Máh: see Garcin de Tassy’s Histoire de la Littérature Hindouie, second edition, tome i, 179, 187, and iii, 47.
[300] The self-same story also occurs in the Calcutta printed Arabic text of the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ with no variation save that instead of smoked eels the husband gives his wanton wife a fresh fish to cook for his dinner on a Friday (the Muslim Sabbath), and then goes out. When the woman returns on the next Friday her husband begins to scold her, but she makes an outcry which brings in the neighbours, and showing them the fish still alive—she had, I suppose, either kept it in water or procured another one; though, how her husband came to give her a live fish does not appear—he is considered mad and loaded with fetters. (See Sir R. F. Burton’s translation, vol v, p. 96.)
[301] This seems to be an imperfect version of the story to which the Trick of the Kází’s Wife belongs, with the underground passage somehow omitted.
[302] It has not hitherto been found in any Arabic text of the ‘Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night,’ but there can be no doubt of its Asiatic origin.
[303] If there are but four players, and three have already been appointed as king, minister, and culprit, it surely follows that there is no necessity for the fourth to throw the sticks at all; else, if the others play along with him at throwing for the “honest man,” their former positions might, and probably would, be changed. Evidently Mr. Knowles has here described the game as it is played by any number of boys, so that when it came to throw for the “honest man,” the three already appointed would stand out and all the others play.
[304] In the fabliau (Méon’s edition of Barbazan, 1808, iii, 126) the little bird says:
“Il a en mon cors une piere,