These
Long Stories Are Mostly Founded Upon Oriental Topics, And In One Of
Them I Recognised With Some Alteration An
Old friend of the
"Arabian Nights." I inquired as to the source from which the story
had been derived, and
The crew all agreed that it had been handed
down unwritten from Greek to Greek. Their account of the matter
does not, perhaps, go very far towards showing the real origin of
the tale; but when I afterwards took up the "Arabian Nights," I
became strongly impressed with a notion that they must have sprung
from the brain of a Greek. It seems to me that these stories,
whilst they disclose a complete and habitual KNOWLEDGE of things
Asiatic, have about them so much of freshness and life, so much of
the stirring and volatile European character, that they cannot have
owed their conception to a mere Oriental, who for creative purposes
is a thing dead and dry - a mental mummy, that may have been a live
king just after the Flood, but has since lain balmed in spice. At
the time of the Caliphat the Greek race was familiar enough to
Baghdad: they were the merchants, the pedlars, the barbers, and
intriguers-general of south-western Asia, and therefore the
Oriental materials with which the Arabian tales were wrought must
have been completely at the command of the inventive people to whom
I would attribute their origin.
We were nearing the isle of Cyprus when there arose half a gale of
wind, with a heavy chopping sea.
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