Professor Galland was a French litterateur of the good old school which is rapidly becoming extinct.  Homme vrai dans les moindres choses (as his Eloge stated); simple in life and manners and single-hearted in his devotion to letters, he was almost childish in worldly matters, while notable for penetration and acumen in his studies.  He would have been as happy, one of his biographers remarks, in teaching children the elements of education as he was in acquiring his immense erudition.  Briefly, truth and honesty, exactitude and indefatigable industry characterised his most honourable career.

Galland informs us (Epist.  Ded.) that his Ms. consisted of four volumes, only three of which are extant,[FN#214] bringing the work down to Night cclxxxii., or about the beginning of “Camaralzaman.”  The missing portion, if it contained like the other volumes 140 pages, would end that tale together with the Stories of Ghanim and the Enchanted (Ebony) Horse; and such is the disposition in the Bresl.  Edit. which mostly favours in its ordinance the text used by the first translator.  But this would hardly have filled more than two-thirds of his volumes; for the other third he interpolated, or is supposed to have interpolated, the ten[FN#215] following tales.

1.  Histoire du prince Zeyn Al-asnam et du Roi des Genies.[FN#216] 2.  Histoire de Codadad et de ses freres. 3.  Histoire de la Lampe merveilleuse (Aladdin). 4.  Histoire de l’aveugle Baba Abdalla. 5.  Histoire de Sidi Nouman. 6.  Histoire de Cogia Hassan Alhabbal. 7.  Histoire d’Ali Baba, et de Quarante Voleurs extermines par une Esclave. 8.  Histoire d’Ali Cogia, marchand de Bagdad. 9.  Histoire du prince Ahmed et de la fee Peri-Banou. 10.  Histoire de deux Soeurs jalouses de leur Cadette.[FN#217]

Concerning these interpolations which contain two of the best and most widely known stories in the work, Aladdin and the Forty Thieves, conjectures have been manifold but they mostly run upon three lines.  De Sacy held that they were found by Galland in the public libraries of Paris.  Mr. Chenery, whose acquaintance with Arabic grammar was ample, suggested that the Professor had borrowed them from the recitations of the Rawis, rhapsodists or professional story-tellers in the bazars of Smyrna and other ports of the Levant.  The late Mr. Henry Charles Coote (in the “Folk-Lore Record,” vol. iii.  Part ii. p. 178 et seq.), “On the source of some of M. Galland’s Tales,” quotes from popular Italian, Sicilian and Romaic stories incidents identical with those in Prince Ahmad, Aladdin, Ali Baba and the Envious Sisters, suggesting that the Frenchman had heard these paramythia in Levantine coffee-houses and had inserted them into his unequalled corpus fabularum.  Mr. Payne (ix. 268) conjectures the probability “of their having been composed at a comparatively recent period by an inhabitant of Baghdad, in imitation of the legends of Haroun er Rashid and other well-known