the literature and the society of the time. But if so, it
is a sleeping dog that neither bites nor barks; and if you let it alone
it will stay in its kennel, and not even obtrude itself upon your view.

To these partly, if not wholly, negative merits it adds positive ones of
a very considerable and delectable kind. The connection with the
_Arabian Nights_ is brought closer still in the fact that it is not only
told (as of himself) by the Prince of Trebizond, Dinarzade's
servant-cavalier, but is linked--to an important extent, and not at all
to Schahriar's unmixed satisfaction--with one of the earliest incidents
of the _Nights_ themselves, the remarkable story how the Lady from the
Sea increases her store of rings at the cost of some exertion and
alarm--not to mention the value of the rings themselves--to the Sultan
and his brother, the King of Tartary. This lady, with her genie and her
glass box, reappears as "Cristalline la Curieuse"--one of the two
heroines. The other, of whose actual adventures we hear only the
beginning, and that at the very close of the story, is Mousseline la
Serieuse, who never laughs, and who, later, escaping literally by the
loss of her last garment, twitched off by the jaws of an enormous
crocodile, afterwards the pest of the country, finds herself under a
mysterious weird. She is never able to get a similar vestment made for
her, either of day- or night-fashion. Three hundred and seventy-four
dozen of such things, which formed her wardrobe, had disappeared[300]
after the death (actually crocodile-devoured) of her Mistress of the
Robes; and although she used up all the linen-drapers' stocks of the
capital in trying to get new ones, they were all somewhat milder
varieties of the shirt of Nessus. For the day-shifts deprived her of all
appetite for food or drink, and the night ones made it impossible for
her to sleep.

This particular incident comes, as has been said, just at the end of
what we have of the book; indeed there is nothing more, save a burlesque
embassy, amply provided with painted cloth[301] and monkeys, to the
great enchanter Caramoussal (who has already figured in the book), and
the announcement, by one of the other Facardins, of its result--a new
adventure for champions, who must either make the Princess laugh or kill
the crocodile. "It is indifferent," we learn from a most Hamiltonian
sentence, "whether you begin with the crocodile or with the Princess."
Indeed there is yet ano