however, has been able to reach fairly definite
conclusions.

The reader will be interested to trace out for himself the
similarities in the adventures of the two Persian queens,
Schehera-zade, and Esther of Bible story, which M. de Goeje has
pointed out as indicating their original identity (_Encyclopaedia
Britannica_, "Thousand and One Nights"). There are two or three
references in tenth-century Arabic literature to a Persian collection
of tales, called _The Thousand Nights_, by the fascination of which
the lady Schehera-zade kept winning one more day's lease of life. A
good many of the tales as we have them contain elements clearly
indicating Persian or Hindu origin. But most of the stories, even
those with scenes laid in Persia or India, are thoroughly Mohammedan
in thought, feeling, situation, and action.

The favorite scene is "the glorious city," ninth-century Bagdad, whose
caliph, Haroun al Raschid, though a great king, and heir of still
mightier men, is known to fame chiefly by the favor of these tales.
But the contents (with due regard to the possibility of later
insertions), references in other writings, and the dialect show that
our _Arabian Nights_ took form in Egypt very soon after the year 1450.
The author, doubtless a professional teller of stories, was, like his
Schehera-zade, a person of extensive reading and faultless memory,
fluent of speech, and ready on occasion to drop into poetry. The
coarseness of the Arabic narrative, which does not appear in our
translation, is characteristic of Egyptian society under the Mameluke
sultans. It would have been tolerated by the subjects of the caliph in
old Bagdad no more than by modern Christians.

More fascinating stories were never told. Though the oath of an
Oriental was of all things the most sacred, and though Schah-riar had
"bound himself by a solemn vow to marry a new wife every night, and
command her to be strangled in the morning," we well believe that he
forswore himself, and granted his bride a stay of execution until he
could find out why the ten polite young gentlemen, all blind of the
right eye, "having blackened themselves, wept and lamented, beating
their heads and breasts, and crying continually, 'This is the fruit of
our idleness and curiosity.'" To be sure, when the golden door has
been opened, and the black horse has vanished with that vicious switch
of his tail, we have a little feeling of having been "sold,"--a
feeling which great art n