[FN#301] Arab.  “Suhbat-hu” lit.=in company with him, a popular idiom in Egypt and Syria.  It often occurs in the Bresl.  Edit.

[FN#302] In the Mac.  Edit.  “Shahzaman,” a corruption of Shah Zaman=King of the Age. (See vol. i. 2)

[FN#303] For a note on this subject see vol. ii. 2.

[FN#304] i.e. bathe her and apply cosmetics to remove ail traces of travel.

[FN#305] These pretentious and curious displays of coquetry are not uncommon in handsome slave-girls when newly bought; and it is a kind of pundonor to humour them.  They may also refuse their favours and a master who took possession of their persons by brute force would be blamed by his friends, men and women.  Even the most despotic of despots, Fath Ali Shah of Persia, put up with refusals from his slave-girls and did not, as would the mean-minded, marry them to the grooms or cooks of the palace.

[FN#306] Such continence is rarely shown by the young Jallabs or slave-traders; when older they learn how much money is lost with the chattel’s virginity.

[FN#307] Midwives in the East, as in the less civilised parts of the West, have many nostrums for divining the sex of the unborn child.

[FN#308] Arabic (which has no written “g”) from Pers.  Gulnar (Gul-i-anar) pomegranate-flower the Gulnare” of Byron who learnt his Orientalism at the Mekhitarist (Armenian) Convent, Venice.  I regret to see the little honour now paid to the gallant poet in the land where he should be honoured the most.  The systematic depreciation was begun by the late Mr. Thackeray, perhaps the last man to value the noble independence of Byron’s spirit; and it has been perpetuated, I regret to see, by better judges.  These critics seem wholly to ignore the fact that Byron founded a school which covered Europe from Russia to Spain, from Norway to Sicily, and which from England passed over to the two Americas.  This exceptional success, which has not yet fallen even to Shakespeare’s lot, was due to genius only, for the poet almost ignored study and poetic art.  His great misfortune was being born in England under the Gerogium Sidus.  Any Continental people would have regarded him s one of the prime glories of his race.

[FN#309] Arab.  “Fi al-Kamar,” which Lane renders “in the moonlight” It seems to me that the allusion is to the Comorin Islands; but the sequel speaks simply of an island.

[FN#310] The Mac.  Edit. misprints Julnar as Julnaz (so the Bul Edit. ii. 233), and Lane ’s Jullanar is an Egyptian vulgarism.  He is right in suspecting the “White City” to be imaginary, but its sea has no apparent connection with the Caspian.  The mermen and mermaids appear to him to be of an inferior order of the Jinn, termed Al-Ghawwasah, the Divers, who fly through air and are made of fire which at times issues from their mouths.

[FN#311] Arab. " la Kulli hal,” a popular phrase, like the Anglo-American " anyhow.”