[201]. See in Trébutien (Avertissement iii.) how Baron von Hammer escaped drowning by the blessing of The Nights.
[202]. He signs his name to the Discours pour servir de Préface.
[203]. I need not trouble the reader with their titles, 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.
[204]. Galland’s version was published in 1704–1717 in 12 vols. 12mo. (Hoeffer’s Biographie; Graesse’s Trésor de Livres rares and Encyclop. Britannica, ixth Edit.)
[205]. See also Leigh Hunt “The Book of the Thousand Nights and one Night,” etc., etc. London and Westminster Review Art. iii., No. lxiv. mentioned in Lane, iii, 746.
[206]. Edition of 1856, vol. xv.
[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 André 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.”
[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 Société Anthropologique and its palace and professors in Paris with our “Institute” au second in a corner of Hanover Square and its skulls in the cellar!
[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.
[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. Lévêque in Les Mythes et les Légendes 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).