And he thought, “That is all the same to me.”

[FN#375] In text “Ant’ amilta maskhar  (for maskharah) matah (for mat…),” idiomatical Fellah-tongue.

[FN#376] Scott (Appendix vol. vi. 460) simply called this tale “The Syrian.”  In M. Clouston’s “Book of Noodles” (pp. 193 194) we find a man who is searching for three greater simpletons than his wife, calling himself “Saw ye ever my like?” It is quoted from Campbell’s “Popular Tales of the West Highlands” (ii. 385 387), but it lacks the canopic wit of the Arabo-Egyptian.  I may note anent the anecdote of the Gabies (p. 201), who proposed, in order to make the tall bride on horseback enter the low village-gate, either to cut off her head or the legs of her steed, that precisely the same tale is told by the biting wits of Damascus concerning the boobies of Halb£n.  “Halb £n,” as these villagers call their ancient hamlet, is justly supposed to be the Helbon whose wine is mentioned by Ezekiel in the traffic of Damascus, although others less reasonably identify it with Halab=Aleppo.

[FN#377] In text “La’bat Shaw ribu-hu"=lit. his mustachios played.

[FN#378] For the “Wak lah,” or caravanserai, see vol. i. 266.

[FN#379] In text “Kab£t,” plur.  Kab b¡t: 

Oh! who is more brave than a dark Suliote,
In his snowy camise and his shaggy capote? 
“Childe Harold,” Canto ii.

And here I cannot but notice the pitiful contrast (on the centenary of the poet’s nativity, Jan. 22nd, ’88) between the land of his birth and that of his death.  The gallant Greeks honoured his memory with wreaths and panegyrics and laudatory articles, declaring that they will never forget the anniversaries of his nativity and his decease.  The British Pharisee and Philistine, true to his miserable creed, ignored all the “real Lord Byron”—­his generosity, his devotion to his friends, his boundless charity, and his enthusiasm for humanity.  They exhaled their venom by carping at Byron’s poetry (which was and is to Europe a greater boon than Shakespeare’s), by condemning his morality (in its dirty sexual sense) and in prophesying for him speedy oblivion.  Have these men no shame in presence of the noble panegyric dedicated by the Prince of German poets, Goethe, to his brother bard whom he welcomed as a prophet?  Can they not blush before Heine (the great German of the future), before Flaubert, Alfred de Musset, Lamartine, Leopardi and a host of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese notables?  Whilst England will not forgive Byron for having separated from his unsympathetic wife, the Literary society of Moscow celebrated his centenary with all honour; and Prof.  Nicholas Storojenko delivered a speech which has found an echo

                                   further west
          Than his sires’ “Islands of the Blest.”

He rightly remarked that Byron’s deadly sin in the eyes of the Georgian-English people was his Cosmopolitanism.  He was the poetical representative of the Sturm und Drang period of the xixth century.  He reflected, in his life and works, the wrath of noble minds at the collapse of the cause of freedom and the reactionary tendency of the century.  Even in the distant regions of Monte Video Byron’s hundredth birthday was not forgotten, and Don Luis Desteffanio’s lecture was welcomed by literary society.