It is characteristic of this work to exhibit a faithful and particular
picture of Eastern manners, customs, and modes of thinking and acting.
And yet, now and then, it is curious to observe the coincidence of
Oriental imagination with that of antiquity and of the North of Europe,
so that it is difficult to conceive the one not to be copied from the
other. Perhaps it was so; and perhaps not. Man is every where man,
possessed of the same faculties, stimulated by the same passions,
deriving pain and pleasure from the same sources, with similar hopes
and fears, aspirations and alarms.
In the Third Voyage of Sinbad he arrives at an island were he finds
one man, a negro, as tall as a palm-tree, and with a single eye in the
middle of his forehead. He takes up the crew, one by one, and selects
the fattest as first to be devoured. This is done a second time. At
length nine of the boldest seize on a spit, while he lay on his back
asleep, and, having heated it red-hot, thrust it into his eye.--This
is precisely the story of Ulysses and the Cyclops.
The story of the Little Hunchback, who is choaked with a fish-bone,
and, after having brought successive individuals into trouble on the
suspicion of murdering him, is restored to life again, is nearly the
best known of the Arabian Tales. The merry jest of Dan Hew, Monk of
Leicester, who "once was hanged, and four times slain," bears a very
striking resemblance to this. [149]
A similar resemblance is to be found, only changing the sex of the
aggressor, between the well known tale of Patient Grizzel, and that of
Cheheristany in the Persian Tales. This lady was a queen of the Gins,
who fell in love with the emperor of China, and agrees to marry him
upon condition that she shall do what she pleases, and he shall never
doubt that what she does is right. She bears him a son, beautiful as
the day, and throws him into the fire. She bears him a daughter, and
gives her to a white bitch, who runs away with her, and disappears.
The emperor goes to war with the Moguls; and the queen utterly
destroys the provisions of his army. But the fire was a salamander,
and the bitch a fairy, who rear the children in the most admirable
manner; and the provisions of the army were poisoned by a traitor, and
are in a miraculous manner replaced by such as were wholesome and of
the most invigorating qualities.