As my first and second volumes (Supplemental) were composed of
translated extracts from the Breslau Edition of The Nights, so this tome
and its successor (volumes iv. and v.) comprise my version from the
(Edward) Wortley Montague Codex immured in the old Bodleian Library,
Oxford.
Absence from England prevents for the present my offering a satisfactory
description of this widely known manuscript; but I may safely promise
that the hiatus shall be filled up in vol. v., which is now ready for
the press.
The contents of the Wortley Montague text are not wholly unfamiliar to
Europe. In 1811 Jonathan Scott, LL.D. Oxon. (for whom see my vols. i.,
ix. and x. 497), printed with Longmans and Co. his “Arabian Nights
Entertainments” in five substantial volumes 8vo, and devoted a sixth and
last to excerpts entitled
TALES
SELECTED FROM THE MANUSCRIPT COPY
OF THE
1001 NIGHTS
BROUGHT TO EUROPE BY EDWARD WORTLEY MONTAGUE, ESQ.
_Translated from the Arabic_
BY JONATHAN SCOTT, LL.D.
Unfortunately for his readers Scott enrolled himself amongst the
acolytes of Professor Galland, a great and original genius in the line
_Raconteur_, and a practical Orientalist whose bright example was
destined to produce disastrous consequences. The Frenchman, however
unscrupulous he might have been about casting down and building up in
order to humour the dead level of Gallican _bon goût_, could, as is
shown by his “Aladdin,” translate literatim and verbatim when the
story-stuff is of the right species and acceptable to the average
European taste. But, as generally happens in such cases, his servile
suite went far beyond their master and model. Petis de la Croix
(“Persian and Turkish Tales”), Chavis and Cazotte (“New Arabian
Nights”), Dow (“Ináyatu llah”) and Morell (“Tales of the Genii”), with
others manifold whose names are now all but forgotten, carried out the
Gallandian liberties to the extreme of licence and succeeded in
producing a branchlet of literature, the most vapid, frigid and insipid
that can be imagined by man,—a bastard Europeo-Oriental, pseudo-Eastern
world of Western marionettes garbed in the gear which Asiatic are (or
were) supposed to wear, with sentiments and opinions, manners and morals
to match; the whole utterly lacking life, local colour, vraisemblance,
human interest. From such abortions, such monstrous births, libera nos,
Domine!