of Al-Mas’udi” (iii. 171), who also notices the Persian monarch’s four seals of office (ii. 204); and “Masrur the Eunuch and Ibn Al-Karibi” (vol. v. 109) is from the same source as Ibn al-Maghazili the Reciter and a Eunuch belonging to the Caliph Al-Mu’tazad (vol. viii. 161).  In the Tale of Tawaddud (vol. v. 139) we have the fullest development of the disputations and displays of learning then so common in Europe, teste the “Admirable Crichton”; and these were affected not only by Eastern tale-tellers but even by sober historians.  To us it is much like “padding” when Nuzhat al-Zaman (vol. ii. 156 etc.) fags her hapless hearers with a discourse covering sixteen mortal pages; when the Wazir Dandan (vol. ii. 195, etc.) reports at length the cold speeches of the five high-bosomed maids and the Lady of Calamities and when Wird Khan, in presence of his papa (Nights cmxiv-xvi.) discharges his patristic exercitations and heterogeneous knowledge.  Yet Al-Mas’udi also relates, at dreary extension (vol. vi. 369) the disputation of the twelve sages in presence of Barmecide Yahya upon the origin, the essence, the accidents and the omnes res of Love; and in another place (vii. 181) shows Honayn, author of the Book of Natural Questions, undergoing a long examination before the Caliph Al-Wasik (Vathek) and describing, amongst other things, the human teeth.  See also the dialogue or catechism of Al-Hajjaj and Ibn Al-Kirriya in Ibn Khallikan (vol. i. 238-240).

These disjecta membra of tales and annals are pleasantly relieved by the seven voyages of Sindbad the Seaman (vol. vi. 1-83).  The “Arabian Odyssey” may, like its Greek brother, descend from a noble family, the “Shipwrecked Mariner” a Coptic travel-tale of the twelfth dynasty (B.  C. 3500) preserved on a papyrus at St. Petersburg.  In its actual condition “Sindbad,” is a fanciful compilation, like De Foe’s “Captain Singleton,” borrowed from travellers’ tales of an immense variety and extracts from Al-Idrisi, Al-Kazwini and Ibn al-Wardi.  Here we find the Polyphemus, the Pygmies and the cranes of Homer and Herodotus; the escape of Aristomenes; the Plinian monsters well known in Persia; the magnetic mountain of Saint Brennan (Brandanus); the aeronautics of “Duke Ernest of Bavaria’’[FN#291] and sundry cuttings from Moslem writers dating between our ninth and fourteenth centuries.[FN#292] The “Shayhk of the Seaboard” appears in the Persian romance of Kamaraupa translated by Francklin, all the particulars absolutely corresponding.  The “Odyssey” is valuable because it shows how far Eastward the mediaeval Arab had extended:  already in The Ignorance he had reached China and had formed a centre of trade at Canton.  But the higher merit of the cento is to produce one of the most charming books of travel ever written, like Robinson Crusoe the delight of children and the admiration of all ages.