[FN#223] Dr. Habicht informs us (Vorwort iii., vol. ix. 7) that he obtained his MS. with other valuable works from Tunis, through a personal acquaintance, a learned Arab, Herr M. Annagar (Mohammed Al-Najjár?) and was aided by Baron de Sacy, Langlès and other savants in filling up the lacunæ by means of sundry MSS. The editing was a prodigy of negligence: the corrigenda (of which brief lists are given) would fill a volume; and, as before noticed, the indices of the first four tomes were printed in the fifth, as if the necessity of a list of tales had just struck the dense editor. After Habicht’s death in 1839 his work was completed in four vols. (ix.-xii.) by the well-known Prof. H. J. Fleischer who had shown some tartness in his “Dissertatio Critica de Glossis Habichtianis.” He carefully imitated all the shortcomings of his predecessor and even omitted the Verzeichniss etc., the Varianten and the Glossary of Arabic words not found in Golius, which formed the only useful part of the first eight volumes.
[FN#224] Die in Tausend und Eine Nacht noch nicht übersetzten Nächte, Erzählungen und Anekdoten, zum erstenmal aus dem Arabischen in das Französische übersetzt von J. von Hammer, und aus dem Französischen in das Deutsche von A. E. Zinserling, Professor, Stuttgart und Tubingen, 1823. Drei Bde. 80 . Trébutien’s, therefore, is the translation of a translation of a translation.
[FN#225] Tausend und Eine Nacht Arabische Erzählungen. Zum erstenmale aus dem Urtexte vollständig und treu uebersetze von Dr. Gustav Weil. He began his work on return from Egypt in 1836 and completed his first version of the Arabische Meisterwerk in 1838-42 (3 vols. roy. oct.). I have the Zweiter Abdruck der dritten (2d reprint of 3d) in 4 vols. 8vo., Stuttgart, 1872. It has more than a hundred woodcuts.
[FN#226] My learned friend Dr. Wilhelm Storck, to whose admirable translations of Camoens I have often borne witness, notes that this Vorhalle, or Porch to the first edition, a rhetorical introduction addressed to the general public, is held in Germany to be valueless and that it was noticed only for the Bemerkung concerning the offensive passages which Professor Weil had toned down in his translation. In the Vorwort of the succeeding editions (Stuttgart) it is wholly omitted.
[FN#227] The most popular are now “Mille ed una notte. Novelle Arabe.” Napoli, 1867, 8vo illustrated, 4 francs; and “Mille ed une notte. Novelle Arabe, versione italiana nuovamente emendata e corredata di note”; 4 vols. in 32 (dateless) Milano, 8vo, 4 francs.
[FN#228] These are; (l) by M. Caussin (de Perceval), Paris, 1806, 9 vols. 8vo. (2) Edouard Gauttier, Paris, 1822-24: 7 vols. 12mo; (3) M. Destain, Paris, 1823-25, 6 vols. 8vo, and (4) Baron de Sacy, Paris. 1838 (?) 3 vols. large 8vo, illustrated (and vilely illustrated).
[FN#229] The number of fables and anecdotes varies in the different texts, but may be assumed to be upwards of four hundred, about half of which were translated by Lane.
[FN#230] I have noticed these points more fully in the beginning of chapt. iii. “The Book of the Sword.”
[FN#231] A notable instance of Roman superficiality, incuriousness and ignorance. Every old Egyptian city had its idols (images of metal, stone or wood), in which the Deity became incarnate as in the Catholic host; besides its own symbolic animal used as a Kiblah or prayer-direction (Jerusalem or Meccah), the visible means of fixing and concentrating the thoughts of the vulgar, like the crystal of the hypnotist or the disk of the electro-biologist. And goddess Diana was in no way better than goddess Pasht. For the true view of idolatry see Koran xxxix. 4. I am deeply grateful to Mr. P. le Page Renouf (Soc. of Biblic. Archæology, April 6, 1886) for identifying the Manibogh, Michabo or Great Hare of the American indigenes with Osiris Unnefer (“Hare God”). These are the lines upon which investigation should run. And of late years there is a notable improvement of tone in treating of symbolism or idolatry: the Lingam and the Yoni are now described as “mystical representations, and perhaps the best possible impersonal representatives of the abstract expressions paternity and maternity” (Prof. Monier Williams in “Folk-lore Record” vol. iii. part i. p. 118).
[FN#232] See Jotham’s fable of the Trees and King Bramble (Judges lxi. 8) and Nathan’s parable of the Poor Man and his little ewe Lamb (2 Sam. ix. 1).