they had re-written the tales and completed the collection by new matter composed or arranged for the purpose.  It is hard to see how the distinguished Arabist came to such a conclusion:  at most it can be true only of the editors and scribes of MSS. evidently copied from each other, such as the Mac. and the Bul. texts.  As the Reviewer (Forbes Falconer?) in the “Asiatic Journal” (vol. xxx., 1839) says, “Every step we have taken in the collation of these agreeable fictions has confirmed us in the belief that the work called the Arabian Nights is rather a vehicle for stories, partly fixed and partly arbitrary, than a collection fairly deserving, from its constant identity with itself, the name of a distinct work, and the reputation of having wholly emanated from the same inventive mind.  To say nothing of the improbability of supposing that one individual, with every license to build upon the foundation of popular stories, a work which had once received a definite form from a single writer, would have been multiplied by the copyist with some regard at least to his arrangement of words as well as matter.  But the various copies we have seen bear about as much mutual resemblance as if they had passed through the famous process recommended for disguising a plagiarism:  ’Translate your English author into French and again into English’.”

Moreover, the style of the several Tales, which will be considered in a future page (Section iii.), so far from being homogeneous is heterogeneous in the extreme.  Different nationalities show them selves; West Africa, Egypt and Syria are all represented and, while some authors are intimately familiar with Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, others are equally ignorant.  All copies, written and printed, absolutely differ in the last tales and a measure of the divergence can be obtained by comparing the Bresl.  Edit. with the Mac. text:  indeed it is my conviction that the MSS. preserved in Europe would add sundry volumes full of tales to those hitherto translated; and here the Wortley Montagu copy can be taken as a test.  We may, I believe, safely compare the history of The Nights with the so-called Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, a collection of immortal ballads and old Epic formulae and verses traditionally handed down from rhapsode to rhapsode, incorporated in a slowly-increasing body of poetry and finally welded together about the age of Pericles.

To conclude.  From the data above given I hold myself justified in drawing the following deductions:—­

1.  The framework of the book is purely Persian perfunctorily arabised; the archetype being the Hazar Afsanah.[FN#196]

2.  The oldest tales, such as Sindibad (the Seven Wazirs) and King Jili’ad, may date from the reign of Al-Mansur, eighth century A.D.

3.  The thirteen tales mentioned above (p. 78) as the nucleus of the Repertory, together with “Dalilah the Crafty,"[FN#197] may be placed in our tenth century.