[483]. Arab. “Názir al-Mawárís”, the employé charged with the disposal of legacies and seizing escheats to the Crown when Moslems die intestate. He is usually a prodigious rascal as in the text. The office was long kept up in Southern Europe, and Camoens was sent to Macao as “Provedor dos defuntos e ausentes.”
[484]. Sir R. F. Burton has since found two more of “Galland’s” tales in an Arabic text of The Nights, namely, Aladdin and Zeyn al-Asnam.
[485]. i.e. wondering; thus Lady Macbeth says:
“You have displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting,
With most admired disorder.”—Macbeth, iii. 4.
[486]. Ludovicus Vives, one of the most learned of Spanish authors, was born at Valentia in 1492 and died in 1540.
[487]. There was an older “Tútí Náma,” which Nakhshabí modernised, made from a Sanskrit story-book, now lost, but its modern representative is the “Suka Saptatí,” or Seventy (Tales) of a Parrot, in which most of Nakhshabí’s tales are found.
[488]. According to Lescallier’s French translation of the “Bakhtyár Náma,” made from two MSS. = “She had previously had a lover, with whom, unknown to her father, she had intimate relations, and had given birth to a beautiful boy, whose education she secretly confided to some trusty servants.”
[489]. There is a slight mistake in the passage in p. 313 supplied from the story in vol. vi. It is not King Shah Bakht, but the other king, who assures his chamberlain that “the lion” had done him no injury.
[490]. Such was formerly the barbarous manner of treating the insane.