alland's version. The MS. ends in the middle of the 631st
night with the well-known Story of King Bekhtzad (Azadbekht) and his son
or the Ten Viziers, (which will be found translated in my "Tales from
the Arabic," Vol. I. pp. 61 et seq.) and contains, immediately after
Night CCCCXXVII and before the story of Ganem, a note in Arabic, of
which the following is a translation:

"The fourth volume of the wonders and marvels of the stories of the
Thousand Nights and One Night was finished by the hand of the humblest
of His' servants in the habit of a minister of religion (Kahin, lit.
a diviner, Cohen), the [Christian] priest Dionysius Shawish, a scion
(selil) of the College of the Romans (Greeks, Europeans or Franks, er
Roum), by name St. Athanasius, in Rome the Greatest [5] (or Greater, utsma,
fem. of aatsem, qu re Constantinople?) on the seven-and-twentieth of the
month Shubat (February) of the year one thousand seven hundred fourscore
and seven, [he being] then teacher of the Arabic tongue in the Library
of the Sultan, King of France, at Paris the Greatest."

From this somewhat incoherent note we may assume that the MS. was
written in the course of the year 1787 by the notorious Syrian
ecclesiastic Dom Denis Chavis, the accomplice of Cazotte in the
extraordinary literary atrocity shortly afterward perpetrated by the
latter under the name of a sequel or continuation of the Thousand and
One Nights [6] (v. Cabinet des Fees, vols. xxxviii--xli), [7] and in all
probability (cf. the mention in the above note of the first part, i.e.
Nights CCLXXXI-CCCCXXVII, as the fourth volume) to supply the place of
Galland's missing fourth volume for the Bibliotheque Royale; but there.
is nothing, except a general similarity of style and the occurrence
in the former of the rest of Camaralzaman and (though not in the same
order) of four of the tales supposed to have been contained in the
latter, to show that Dom Chavis made his copy from a text identical
with that used by the French savant. In the notes to his edition of the
Arabic text of Aladdin, M. Zotenberg gives a number of extracts from
this MS., from which it appears that it is written in a very vulgar
modern Syrian style and abounds in grammatical errors, inconsistencies
and incoherences of every description, to say nothing of the fact that
the Syrian ecclesiastic seems, with the characteristic want of taste
and presumption which might be expected from the joint-author of "Les
Veillee