brought forward, in his “Note sur l’origine Persane des Mille et
une Nuits,” a second and an even more important witness: this was
the famous Kitab al-Fihrist,[FN#142] or Index List of (Arabic)
works, written (in A.H. 387 = 987) by Mohammed bin Is’hák al-Nadím
(cup-companion or equerry), “popularly known as Ebou Yacoub
el-Werrek.”[FN#143 ] The following is an extract (p. 304) from the
Eighth Discourse which consists of three arts (funún).[FN#144] “The
first section on the history of the confabulatores nocturni (tellers
of night tales) and the relaters of fanciful adventures, together with
the names of books treating upon such subjects. Mohammed ibn Is’hak
saith: The first who indited themes of imagination and made books of
them, consigning these works to the libraries, and who ordered some
of them as though related by the tongues of brute beasts, were the
palæo-Persians (and the Kings of the First Dynasty). The Ashkanian
Kings of the Third Dynasty appended others to them and they were
augmented and amplified in the days of the Sassanides (the fourth and
last royal house). The Arabs also translated them into Arabic, and the
loquent and eloquent polished and embellished them and wrote others
resembling them. The first work of such kind was entituled The Book
of Hazar Afsán,’ signifying Alf Khuráfah, the argument whereof was as
follows. A King of their Kings was wont, when he wedded a woman and had
lain one night with her, to slay her on the next morning. Presently
he espoused a damsel of the daughters of the Kings, Shahrázád[FN#145]
hight, one endowed with intellect and erudition and, whenas she lay
with him, she fell to telling him tales of fancy; moreover she used to
connect the story at the end of the night with that which might induce
the King to preserve her alive and to ask her of its ending on the
next night until a thousand nights had passed over her. Meanwhile he
cohabited with her till she was blest by boon of child of him, when she
acquainted him with the device she had wrought upon him; wherefore he
admired her intelligence and inclined to her and preserved her life.
That King had also a Kahramánah (nurse and duenna, not entremetteuse),
hight Dínárzád (Dunyázád?), who aided the wife in this (artifice). It
is also said that this book was composed for (or, by) Humái daughter
of Bahman[FN#146] and in it were included other matters. Mohammed bin
Is’hak adds: —And the truth is, Inshallah,[FN#147] that the first
who solaced himself with hearing night-tales was Al-Iskandar (he of
Macedon) and he had a number of men who used to relate to him imaginary
stories and provoke him to laughter: he, however, designed not therein
merely to please himself, but that he might thereby become the more
cautious and alert. After him the Kings in like fashion made use of the
book entitled Hazár Afsán.’ It containeth a thousand nights, but less
than two hundred night-stories, for a single history often occupied
several nights. I have seen it complete sundry times; and it is, in
truth, a corrupted book of cold tales.”[FN#148]
A writer in The Athenum,[FN#149] objecting to Lane’s modern date
for The Nights, adduces evidence to prove the greater antiquity of
the work. (Abu al-Hasan) Ibn Sa’id (bin Musa al-Gharnati = of
Granada) born in A.H. 615 = 1218 and ob. Tunis A.H. 685 = 1286,
left his native city and arrived at Cairo in A.H. 639 = 1241. This
Spanish poet and historian wrote Al-Muhallá bi al-Ash’ár (The
Adorned with Verses), a Topography of Egypt and Africa, which is
apparently now lost. In this he quotes from Al-Kurtubi, the
Cordovan;[FN#150] and he in his turn is quoted by the Arab
historian of Spain, Abú al-Abbás Ahmad bin Mohammed al Makkári, in
the “Windwafts of Perfume from the Branches of Andalusia the
Blooming”[FN#151] (A.D. 1628–29). Mr. Payne (x. 301) thus
translates from Dr. Dozy’s published text.
“Ibn Said (may God have mercy upon him!) sets forth in his book, El
Muhella bi-s-Shaar, quoting from El Curtubi the story of the building
of the Houdej in the Garden of Cairo, the which was of the magnificent
pleasaunces of the Fatimite Khalifs, the rare of ordinance and
surpassing, to wit that the Khalif El Aamir bi-ahkam-illah[FN#152 ] let
build it for a Bedouin woman, the love of whom had gotten the mastery
of him, in the neighbourhood of the ‘Chosen Garden’[FN#153] and used to
resort often thereto and was slain as he went thither; and it ceased
not to be a pleasuring-place for the Khalifs after him. The folk abound
in stories of the Bedouin girl and Ibn Meyyah[FN#154] of the sons of
her uncle (cousin?) and what hangs thereby of the mention of El-Aamir,
so that the tales told of them on this account became like unto the
story of El Bettál[FN#155] and the Thousand Nights and a Night and what
resembleth them.”
The same passage from Ibn Sa’id, corresponding in three MSS.,
occurs in the famous Khitat[FN#156] attributed to Al-Makrizi (ob.
A.D. 1444) and was thus translated from a MS. in the British Museum
by Mr. John Payne (ix. 303)
“The Khalif El-Aamir bi-ahkam-illah set apart, in the neighbourhood
of the Chosen Garden, a place for his beloved the Bedouin maid
(Aaliyah)[FN#157] which he named El Houdej. Quoth Ibn Said, in the
book El-Muhella bi-l-ashar, from the History of El Curtubi,
concerning the traditions of the folk of the story of the Bedouin
maid and Ibn Menah (Meyyah) of the sons of her uncle and what hangs
thereby of the mention of the Khalif El Aamír bi-ahkam-illah, so
that their traditions (or tales) upon the garden became like unto
El Bettál[FN#158] and the Thousand Nights and what resembleth
them.”
This evidently means either that The Nights existed in the days of
Al-’Ámir (xiith cent.) or that the author compared them with a work
popular in his own age. Mr. Payne attaches much importance to the
discrepancy of titles, which appears to me a minor detail. The
change of names is easily explained. Amongst the Arabs, as amongst
the wild Irish, there is divinity (the proverb says luck) in odd
numbers and consequently the others are inauspicious. Hence as Sir
Wm. Ouseley says (Travels ii. 21), the number Thousand and One is
a favourite in the East (Olivier, Voyages vi. 385, Paris 1807), and
quotes the Cistern of the “Thousand and One Columns” at
Constantinople. Kaempfer (Amn, Exot. p. 38) notes of the Takiyahs
or Dervishes’ convents and the Mazárs or Santons’ tombs near Koniah
(Iconium), “Multa seges sepulchralium quæ virorum ex omni ævo
doctissimorum exuvias condunt, mille et unum recenset auctor Libri
qui inscribitur Hassaaer we jek mesaar (Hazár ve yek Mezár), i.e.,
mille et unum mausolea.” A book, The Hazar o yek Ruz ( = 1001
Days), was composed in the mid-xviith century by the famous
Dervaysh Mukhlis, Chief Sofi of Isfahan: it was translated into
French by Petis de la Croix, with a preface by Cazotte, and was
englished by Ambrose Phillips. Lastly, in India and throughout Asia
where Indian influence extends, the number of cyphers not followed
by a significant number is indefinite: for instance, to determine
hundreds the Hindus affix the required figure to the end and for
100 write 101; for 1000, 1001. But the grand fact of the Hazár
Afsánah is its being the archetype of The Nights, unquestionably
proving that the Arab work borrows from the Persian bodily its
cadre or frame-work, the principal characteristic; its exordium and
its dénoûement, whilst the two heroines still bear the old Persic
names.
Baron Silvestre de Sacy[FN#159]—clarum et venerabile nomen—is the
chief authority for the Arab provenance of The Nights. Apparently
founding his observations upon Galland,[FN#160] he is of opinion
that the work, as now known, was originally composed in
Syria[FN#161] and written in the vulgar dialect; that it was never
completed by the author, whether he was prevented by death or by
other cause; and that imitators endeavoured to finish the work by
inserting romances which were already known but which formed no
part of the original recueil, such as the Travels of Sindbad the
Seaman, the Book of the Seven Wazirs and others. He accepts the
Persian scheme and cadre of the work, but no more. He contends that
no considerable body of præ-Mohammedan or non-Arabic fiction
appears in the actual texts[FN#162]; and that all the tales, even
those dealing with events localised in Persia, India, China and
other infidel lands and dated from ante-islamitic ages mostly with
the naïvest anachronism, confine themselves to depicting the
people, manners and customs of Baghdad and Mosul, Damascus and
Cairo, during the Abbaside epoch, and he makes a point of the whole
being impregnated with the strongest and most zealous spirit of
Mohammedanism. He points out that the language is the popular or
vulgar dialect, differing widely from the classical and literary;
that it contains many words in common modern use and that generally
it suggests the decadence of Arabian literature. Of one tale he
remarks:—The History of the loves of Camaralzaman and Budour,
Princess of China, is no more Indian or Persian than the others.
The prince’s father has Moslems for subjects, his mother is named
Fatimah and when imprisoned he solaces himself with reading the
Koran. The Genii who interpose in these adventures are, again,
those who had dealings with Solomon. In fine, all that we here find
of the City of the Magians, as well as of the fire-worshippers,
suffices to show that one should not expect to discover in it
anything save the production of a Moslem writer.
All this, with due deference to so high an authority, is very
superficial. Granted, which nobody denies, that the archetypal Hazár
Afsánah was translated from Persic into Arabic nearly a thousand years
ago, it had ample time and verge enough to assume another and a foreign
dress, the corpus however remaining untouched. Under the hands of a
host of editors, scribes and copyists, who have no scruples anent
changing words, names and dates, abridging descriptions and attaching
their own decorations, the florid and rhetorical Persian would readily
be converted into the straight-forward, business-like, matter of fact
Arabic. And what easier than to islamise the old Zoroasterism, to
transform Ahrimán into Iblís the Shaytan, Ján bin Ján into Father Adam,
and the Divs and Peris of Kayomars and the olden Guebre Kings into the
Jinns and Jinniyahs of Sulayman? Volumes are spoken by the fact that
the Arab adapter did not venture to change the Persic names of the two
heroines and of the royal brothers or to transfer the mise-en-scène any
whither from Khorasan or outer Persia. Where the story has not been too
much worked by the literato’s pen, for instance the “Ten Wazirs” (in
the Bresl. Edit. vi. 191–343) which is the Guebre Bakhtiyár-námah, the
names and incidents are old Iranian and with few exceptions distinctly
Persian. And at times we can detect the process of transition, e.g.
when the Mázin of Khorásán[FN#163] of the Wortley Montagu MS. becomes
the Hasan of Bassorah of the Turner Macan MS. (Mac. Edit.).
Evidently the learned Baron had not studied such works as the Totá-kaháni
or Parrot-chat which, notably translated by Nakhshabi from
the Sanskrit Suka-Saptati,[FN#164] has now become as orthodoxically
Moslem as The Nights. The old Hindu Rajah becomes Ahmad Sultan of
Balkh, the Prince is Maymún and his wife Khujisteh. Another
instance of such radical change is the later Syriac version of
Kaliliah wa Dimnah,[FN#165] old “Pilpay” converted to Christianity.
We find precisely the same process in European folk-lore; for
instance the Gesta Romanorum in which, after five hundred years,
the life, manners and customs of the Romans lapse into the knightly
and chivalrous, the Christian and ecclesiastical developments of
mediæval Europe. Here, therefore, I hold that the Austrian Arabist
has proved his point whilst the Frenchman has failed.
Mr. Lane, during his three years’ labour of translation, first
accepted Von Hammer’s view and then came round to that of De Sacy;
differing, however, in minor details, especially in the native
country of The Nights. Syria had been chosen because then the most
familiar to Europeans: the “Wife of Bath” had made three
pilgrimages to Jerusalem; but few cared to visit the barbarous and
dangerous Nile-Valley. Mr. Lane, however, was an enthusiast for
Egypt or rather for Cairo, the only part of it he knew; and, when
he pronounces The Nights to be of purely “Arab,” that is, of
Nilotic origin, his opinion is entitled to no more deference than
his deriving the sub-African and negroid Fellah from Arabia, the
land per excellentiam of pure and noble blood. Other authors have
wandered still further afield. Some finding Mosul idioms in the
Recueil, propose “Middlegates” for its birth-place and Mr. W. G. P.
Palgrave boldly says “The original of this entertaining work
appears to have been composed in Baghdad about the eleventh
century; another less popular but very spirited version is probably
of Tunisian authorship and somewhat later.”[FN#166]
B.—The Date.
The next point to consider is the date of The Nights in its present
form; and here opinions range between the tenth and the sixteenth
centuries. Professor Galland began by placing it arbitrarily in the
middle of the thirteenth. De Sacy, who abstained from detailing
reasons and who, forgetting the number of editors and scribes
through whose hands it must have passed, argued only from the
nature of the language and the peculiarities of style, proposed le
milieu du neuvième siècle de l’hégire ( = A.D. 1445–6) as its
latest date. Mr. Hole, who knew The Nights only through Galland’s
version, had already advocated in his “Remarks” the close of the
fifteenth century; and M. Caussin (de Perceval), upon the authority
of a supposed note in Galland’s MS.[FN#167] (vol. iii. fol. 20,
verso), declares the compiler to have been living in A.D. 1548 and
1565. Mr. Lane says “Not begun earlier than the last fourth of the
fifteenth century nor ended before the first fourth of the
sixteenth,” i.e. soon after Egypt was conquered by Selim, Sultan of
the Osmanli Turks in A.D. 1517. Lastly the learned Dr. Weil says in
his far too scanty Vorwort (p. ix. 2nd Edit.):-“Das
wahrscheinlichste dürfte also sein, das im 15. Jahrhundert ein
Egyptier nach altern Vorbilde Erzählungen für 1001 Nächte theils
erdichtete, theils nach mündlichen Sagen, oder frühern
schriftlichen Aufzeichnungen, bearbeitete, dass er aber entweder
sein Werk nicht vollendete, oder dass ein Theil desselben verloren
ging, so dass das Fehlende von Andern bis ins 16. Jahrhundert
hinein durch neue Erzählungen ergänzt wurde.”
But, as justly observed by Mr. Payne, the first step when enquiring
into the original date of The Nights is to determine the nucleus of
the Repertory by a comparison of the four printed texts and the
dozen MSS. which have been collated by scholars.[FN#168] This
process makes it evident that the tales common to all are the
following thirteen:—
1. The Introduction (with a single incidental story “The Bull and
the Ass”).
2. The Trader and the Jinni (with three incidentals).
3. The Fisherman and the Jinni (with four).
4. The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad (with six).
5. The Tale of the Three Apples.
6. The Tale of Núr-al-Dín Ali and his son Badr al-Dín Hasan.
7. The Hunchback’s Tale (with eleven incidentals).
8. Nur al-Dín and Anís al-Jalís.
9. Tale of Ghánim bin ’Ayyúb (with two incidentals).
10. Alí bin Bakkár and Shams al-Nahár (with two).
11. Tale of Kamar al-Zamán.
12. The Ebony Horse; and
13. Julnár the Seaborn.
These forty-two tales, occupying one hundred and twenty Nights,
form less than a fifth part of the whole collection which in the
Mac. Edit.[FN#169] contains a total of two hundred and sixty-four.
Hence Dr. Patrick Russell,[FN#170] the Natural Historian of
Aleppo,[FN#171] whose valuable monograph amply deserves study even
in this our day, believed that the original Nights did not
outnumber two hundred, to which subsequent writers added till the
total of a thousand and one was made up. Dr. Jonathan
Scott,[FN#172] who quotes Russell, “held it highly probable that
the tales of the original Arabian Nights did not run through more
than two hundred and eighty Nights, if so many.” So this suggestion
I may subjoin, “habent sue fate libelli.” Galland, who preserves in
his Mille et une Nuits only about one fourth of The Nights, ends
them in No. cclxiv[FN#173] with the seventh voyage of Sindbad:
after that he intentionally omits the dialogue between the sisters
and the reckoning of time, to proceed uninterruptedly with the
tales. And so his imitator, Petis de la Croix,[FN#174] in his Mille
et un Jours, reduces the thousand to two hundred and thirty-two.
The internal chronological evidence offered by the Collection is
useful only in enabling us to determine that the tales were not
written _after_ a certain epoch: the actual dates and, consequently,
all deductions from them, are vitiated by the habits of the
scribes. For instance we find the Tale of the Fisherman and the
Jinni (vol. i. 41) placed in A.H. 169 = A.D. 785,[FN#175] which is
hardly possible. The immortal Barber in the “Tailor’s Tale” (vol.
i. 304) places his adventure with the unfortunate lover on Safar
10, A.H. 653 ( = March 25th, 1255) and 7,320 years of the era of
Alexander.[FN#176] This is supported in his Tale of Himself (vol.
i. pp. 317–348), where he dates his banishment from Baghdad during
the reign of the penultimate Abbaside, Al-Mustansir bi
’llah[FN#177] (A.H. 623–640 = 1225–1242), and his return to Baghdad
after the accession of another Caliph who can be no other but Al-Muntasim
bi ’llah (A.H. 640–656 = A.D. 1242–1258). Again at the end
of the tale (vol. i. 350) he is described as “an ancient man, past
his ninetieth year” and “a very old man” in the days of Al-Mustansir
(vol. i. 318); so that the Hunchback’s adventure can
hardly be placed earlier than A.D. 1265 or seven years after the
storming of Baghdad by Huláku Khan, successor of Janghíz Khan, a
terrible catastrophe which resounded throughout the civilised
world. Yet there is no allusion to this crucial epoch and the total
silence suffices to invalidate the date.[FN#178] Could we assume it
as true, by adding to A.D. 1265 half a century for the composition
of the Hunchback’s story and its incidentals, we should place the
earliest date in A.D. 1315.
As little can we learn from inferences which have been drawn from
the body of the book: at most they point to its several editions or
redactions. In the Tale of the “Ensorcelled Prince” (vol. i. 77)
Mr. Lane (i. 135) conjectured that the four colours of the fishes
were suggested by the sumptuary laws of the Mameluke Soldan,
Mohammed ibn Kala’un, “subsequently to the commencement of the
eighth century of the Flight, or fourteenth of our era.” But he
forgets that the same distinction of dress was enforced by the
Caliph Omar after the capture of Jerusalem in A.D. 636; that it was
revived by Harun al-Rashid, a contemporary of Carolus Magnus and
that it was noticed as a long standing grievance by the so-called
Mandeville in A.D. 1322. In the Tale of the Porter and the Ladies
of Baghdad the “Sultáni oranges” (vol. i. 83) have been connected
with Sultáníyah city in Persian Irák, which was founded about the
middle of the thirteenth century: but “Sultáni” may simply mean
“royal,” a superior growth. The same story makes mention (vol. i.
94) of Kalandars or religious mendicants, a term popularly
corrupted, even in writing, to Karandal.[FN#179] Here again
“Kalandar” may be due only to the scribes as the Bresl. Edit. reads
Sa’alúk = asker, beggar. The Khan al-Masrúr in the Nazarene
Broker’s story (i. 265) was a ruin during the early ninth century
A.H. = A.D. 1420; but the Báb Zuwaylah (i. 269) dates from A.D.
1087. In the same tale occurs the Darb al-Munkari (or Munakkari)
which is probably the Darb al-Munkadi of Al-Makrizi’s careful
topography, the Khitat (ii. 40). Here we learn that in his time
(about A.D. 1430) the name had become obsolete, and the highway was
known as Darb al-Amír Baktamír al-Ustaddar from one of two high
officials who both died in the fourteenth century (circ. A.D.
1350). And lastly we have the Khan al-Jáwali built about A.D. 1320.
In Badr al-Din Hasan (vol. i. 237) “Sáhib” is given as a Wazirial
title and it dates only from the end of the fourteenth
century.[FN#180] In Sindbad the Seaman, there is an allusion (vol.
vi. 67) to the great Hindu Kingdom, Vijayanagar of the
Narasimha,[FN#181] the great power of the Deccan; but this may be
due to editors or scribes as the despotism was founded only in the
fourteenth century(A.D. 1320). The Ebony Horse (vol. v. 1)
apparently dates before Chaucer; and “The Sleeper and The Waker”
(Bresl. Edit. iv. 134–189) may precede Shakespeare’s “Taming of the
Shrew”: no stress, however, can be laid upon such resemblances, the
nouvelles being world-wide. But when we come to the last stories,
especially to Kamar al-Zaman II. and the tale of Ma’arúf, we are
apparently in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first
contains (Night cmlxxvii.) the word Láwandiyah = Levantine, the
mention of a watch = Sá’ah in the next Night[FN#182]; and, further
on (cmlxxvi.), the “Shaykh Al-Islam,” an officer invented by
Mohammed II. after the capture of Stambul in A.D. 1453. In Ma’arúf
the ’Ádiliyah is named; the mosque founded outside the Bab al-Nasr
by Al-Malik al-’Ádil, Túmán Bey in A.H. 906 = A.D. 1501. But, I
repeat, all these names may be mere interpolations.
On the other hand, a study of the vie intime in Al-Islam and of the
manners and customs of the people proves that the body of the work,
as it now stands, must have been written before A.D. 1400. The
Arabs use wines, ciders and barley-beer, not distilled spirits;
they have no coffee or tobacco and, while familiar with small-pox
(judrí), they ignore syphilis. The battles in The Nights are fought
with bows and javelins, swords, spears (for infantry) and lances
(for cavalry); and, whenever fire-arms are mentioned, we must
suspect the scribe. Such is the case with the Madfa’ or cannon by
means of which Badr Al-Din Hasan breaches the bulwarks of the Lady
of Beauty’s virginity (i. 223). This consideration would determine
the work to have been written before the fourteenth century. We
ignore the invention-date and the inventor of gunpowder, as of all
old discoveries which have affected mankind at large: all we know
is that the popular ideas betray great ignorance and we are led to
suspect that an explosive compound, having been discovered in the
earliest ages of human society, was utilised by steps so gradual
that history has neglected to trace the series. According to
Demmin[FN#183], bullets for stuffing with some incendiary
composition, in fact bombs, were discovered by Dr. Keller in the
Palafites or Crannogs of Switzerland; and the Hindu’s Agni-Astar
(“fire-weapon”), Agni-bán (“fire-arrow”) and Shatagni (“hundred-killer
”), like the Roman Phalarica, and the Greek fire of
Byzantium, suggest explosives. Indeed, Dr. Oppert[FN#184] accepts
the statement of Flavius Philostratus that when Appolonius of
Tyana, that grand semi-mythical figure, was travelling in India, he
learned the reason why Alexander of Macedon desisted from attacking
the Oxydracæ who live between the Ganges and the Hyphasis (Satadru
or Sutledge):—“These holy men, beloved by the gods, overthrow
their enemies with tempests and thunderbolts shot from their
walls.” Passing over the Arab sieges of Constantinople (A.D. 668)
and Meccah (A.D. 690) and the disputed passage in Firishtah
touching the Tufang or musket during the reign of Mahmúd the
Ghaznevite[FN#185] (ob. A.D. 1030), we come to the days of Alphonso
the Valiant, whose long and short guns, used at the Siege of Madrid
in A.D. 1084, are preserved in the Armeria Real. Viardot has noted
that the African Arabs first employed cannon in A.D. 1200, and that
the Maghribis defended Algeciras near Gibraltar with great guns in
A. D. 1247, and utilised them to besiege Seville in A.D. 1342. This
last feat of arms introduced the cannon into barbarous Northern
Europe, and it must have been known to civilised Asia for many a
decade before that date.
The mention of wine in The Nights, especially the Nabíz or
fermented infusion of raisins well known to the præ-Mohammeden
Badawis, perpetually recurs. As a rule, except only in the case of
holy personages and mostly of the Caliph Al-Rashid, the “service of
wine” appears immediately after the hands are washed; and women, as
well as men, drink, like true Orientals, for the honest purpose of
getting drunk—la recherche de l’idéal, as the process has been
called. Yet distillation became well known in the fourteenth
century. Amongst the Greeks and Romans it was confined to
manufacturing aromatic waters, and Nicander the poet (B.C. 140)
used for a still the term ἄμβιξ, like the Irish “pot” and its
produce “poteen.” The simple art of converting salt water into
fresh, by boiling the former and passing the steam through a cooled
pipe into a recipient, would not have escaped the students of the
Philosopher’s “stone;” and thus we find throughout Europe the
Arabic modifications of Greek terms Alchemy, Alembic (Al-ἄμβιξ),
Chemistry and Elixir; while “Alcohol” (Al-Kohl), originally meaning
“extreme tenuity or impalpable state of pulverulent substances,”
clearly shows the origin of the article. Avicenna, who died in A.H.
428 = 1036, nearly two hundred years before we read of distillation
in Europe, compared the human body with an alembic, the belly being
the cucurbit and the head the capital:—he forgot one important
difference but n’importe. Spirits of wine were first noticed in the
xiiith century, when the Arabs had overrun the Western
Mediterranean, by Arnaldus de Villa Nova, who dubs the new
invention a universal panacea; and his pupil, Raymond Lully (nat.
Majorca A.D. 1236), declared this essence of wine to be a boon from
the Deity. Now The Nights, even in the latest adjuncts, never
allude to the “white coffee” of the “respectable” Moslem, the Ráki
(raisin-brandy) or Ma-hayát (aqua-vitæ) of the modern Mohametan:
the drinkers confine themselves to wine like our contemporary
Dalmatians, one of the healthiest and the most vigorous of
seafaring races in Europe.