mirth,” and beauty which has illuminating powers; he foully reviles old age and he alternately praises and abuses the sex, concerning which more presently.  He delights in truisms, the fashion of contemporary Europe (see Palmerin of England chapt. vii), such as “It is the fashion of the heart to receive pleasure from those things which ought to give it,” etc. etc.  What is there the wise cannot understand? and so forth.  He is liberal in trite reflections and frigid conceits (i. 19, 55, 97, 103, 107, in fact everywhere); and his puns run through whole lines; this in fine Sanskrit style is inevitable.  Yet some of his expressions are admirably terse and telling, e. g.  Ascending the swing of Doubt:  Bound together (lovers) by the leash of gazing:  Two babes looking like Misery and Poverty:  Old Age seized me by the chin:  (A lake) first assay of the Creator’s skill:  (A vow) difficult as standing on a sword-edge:  My vital spirits boiled with the fire of woe:  Transparent as a good man’s heart:  There was a certain convent full of fools:  Dazed with scripture-reading:  The stones could not help laughing at him:  The Moon kissed the laughing forehead of the East:  She was like a wave of the Sea of Love’s insolence (ii. 127), a wave of the Sea of Beauty tossed up by the breeze of Youth:  The King played dice, he loved slave-girls, he told lies, he sat up o’ nights, he waxed wroth without reason, he took wealth wrongously, he despised the good and honoured the bad (i. 562); with many choice bits of the same kind.  Like the Arab the Indian is profuse in personification; but the doctrine of pre-existence, of incarnation and emanation and an excessive spiritualism ever aiming at the infinite, makes his imagery run mad.  Thus we have Immoral Conduct embodied; the God of Death; Science; the Svarga-heaven; Evening; Untimeliness, and the Earth-bride, while the Ace and Deuce of dice are turned into a brace of Demons.  There is also that grotesqueness which the French detect even in Shakespeare, e. g.  She drank in his ambrosial form with thirsty eyes like partridges (i. 476) and it often results from the comparison of incompatibles, e. g. a row of birds likened to a garden of nymphs; and from forced allegories, the favourite figure of contemporary Europe.  Again, the rhetorical Hindu style differs greatly from the sobriety, directness and simplicity of the Arab, whose motto is Brevity combined with precision, except where the latter falls into “fine writing.”  And, finally, there is a something in the atmosphere of these Tales which is unfamiliar to the West and which makes them, as more than one has remarked to me, very hard reading.

[FN#298] The Introduction (i. 1-5) leads to the Curse of Pushpadanta and Malyavan who live on Earth as Vararuchi and Gunadhya and this runs through lib. i.  Lib. ii. begins with the Story of Udayana to whom we must be truly grateful as our only guide:  he and his son Naravahanadatta fill up the rest and end with lib. xviii.  Thus the want of the clew or plot compels a division into books, which begin for instance with “We worship the elephantine proboscis of Ganesha” (lib. x. i.) a reverend and awful object to a Hindu but to Englishmen mainly suggesting the “Zoo.”  The “Bismillah” of The Nights is much more satisfactory.