[250]. Because Sí = thirty and Murgh = bird. In McClenachan’s Addendum to Mackay’s Encyclopædia of Freemasonry we find the following definition: “Simorgh. A monstrous griffin, guardian of the Persian mysteries.”
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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?”
[255]. See De Sacy’s Chrestomathie Arabe (Paris, 1826), vol. i.
[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.