to confirm the delusion.  After he had experienced as much of the pleasures of Paradise, which the Prophet has promised to the faithful, as his strength would admit; after quaffing enervating delight from the eyes of the houris and intoxicating wine from the glittering goblets; he sank into the lethargy produced by debility and the opiate, on awakening from which, after a few hours, he again found himself by the side of his superior.  The latter endeavored to convince him that corporeally he had not left his side, but that spiritually he had been wrapped into Paradise and had there enjoyed a foretaste of the bliss which awaits the faithful who devote their lives to the service of the faith and the obedience of their chiefs.

 The ten Wazirs; or, the history of king Azadbakht and his son
                        Vol.  XI. p. 37.

The precise date of the Persian original of this romance ("Bakhtyar Nama”) has not been ascertained, but it was probably composed before the beginning of the fifteenth century, since there exists in the Bodleian Library a unique Turki version, in the Uygur language and characters, which was written in 1434.  Only three of the tales have hitherto been found in other Asiatic storybooks.  The Turki version, according to M. Jaubert, who gives an account of the Ms. and a translation of one of the tales in the Journal Asiatique, tome x. 1827, is characterised by “great sobriety of ornament and extreme simplicity of style, and the evident intention on the part of the translator to suppress all that may not have appeared to him sufficiently probable, and all that might justly be taxed with exaggeration;” and he adds that “apart from the interest which the writing and phraseology of the work may possess for those who study the history of languages, it is rather curious to see how a Tatar translator sets to work to bring within the range of his readers stories embellished in the original with descriptions and images familiar, doubtless, to a learned and refined nation like the Persians, for foreign to shepherds.”

At least three different versions are known to the Malays--different in the frame, or leading story, if not in the subordinate tales.  One of those is described in the second volume of Newbold’s work on Malacca, the frame of which is similar to the Persian original and its Arabian derivative, excepting that the name of the king is Zadbokhtin and that of the minister’s daughter (who is nameless in the Persian) is Mahrwat.  Two others are described in Van den Berg’s account of Malay, Arabic, Javanese and other MSS. published at Batavia, 1877:  p. 21, No. 132 is entitled “The History of Ghulam, son of Zadbukhtan, King of Adan, in Persia,” and the frame also corresponds with our version, with the important difference that the robber-chief who had brought up Ghulam, “learning that he had become a person of consequence, came to his residence