[FN#474] There is no historical person who answers to these name, “The Secure, the Ruler by Commandment of Allah.”  The cognomen applies to two soldans of Egypt, of whom the later Abu al-Abbas Ahmad the Abbaside (A.D. 1261-1301) has already been mentioned in The Nights (vol. v. 86).  The tale suggests the earlier Al-Hakim (Abu Ali al-Mansur, the Fatimite, A.D. 995-1021), the God of the Druze “persuasion;” and the tale-teller may have purposely blundered in changing Mansur to Maamun for fear of offending a sect which has been most dangerous in the matter of assassination and which is capable of becoming so again.

[FN#475] Arab. “’Ala kulli hal” = “whatever may betide,” or “willy-nilly.”  The phrase is still popular.

[FN#476] The dulce desipere of young lovers, he making a buffoon of himself to amuse her.

[FN#477] “The convent of Clay,” a Coptic monastery near Cairo.

[FN#478] i.e. this is the time to show thyself a man.

[FN#479] The Eastern succedaneum for swimming corks and other “life-preservers.”  The practice is very ancient; we find these guards upon the monuments of Egypt and Babylonia.

[FN#480] Arab.  “Al-Khalij,” the name, still popular, of the Grand Canal of Cairo, whose banks, by-the-by, are quaint and picturesque as anything of the kind in Holland.

[FN#481] We say more laconically “A friend in need.”

[FN#482] Arab.  “Nazir al-Mawaris,” the employe charged with the disposal of legacies and seizing escheats to the Crown when Moslems die intestate.  He is usually a prodigious rascal as in the text.  The office was long kept up in Southern Europe, and Camoens was sent to Macao as “Provedor dos defuntos e ausentes.”

[FN#483] Sir R. F. Burton has since found two more of “Galland’s” tales in an Arabic text of The Nights, namely, Aladdin and Zeyn al-Asnam.

[FN#484] i.e. wondering; thus Lady Macbeth says: 

          “You have displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting,
          With most admired disorder.”—–­Macbeth, iii. 4

[FN#485] Ludovicus Vives, one of the most learned of Spanish authors, was born at Valentia in 1492 and died in 1540.

[FN#486] There was an older “Tuti Nama,” which Nakhshabi modernised, made from a Sanskrit story-book, now lost, but its modern representative is the “Suka Saptati,” or Seventy (Tales) of a Parrot in which most of Nakhshabi’s tales are found.

[FN#487] According to Lescallier’s French translation of the “Bakhtyar Nama,” made from two MSS. = “She had previously had a lover, with whom, unknown to her father, she had intimate relations, and had given birth to a beautiful boy, whose education she secretly confided to some trusty servants.”

[FN#488] There is a slight mistake in the passage in p. 313 supplied from the story in vol. vi.  It is not King Shah Bakht, but the other king, who assures his chamberlain that “the lion” has done him no injury.