the harder the vicious animal kicked, till at last the poor man, all bruises and blood, declared that he had accused the merchant falsely, for his own ass never had a tail. Then the judge mulcted him in 100 dínárs. Another man accused the merchant of having thrown a stone at his runaway mule, and knocked out one of his eyes, thus reducing the value of the mule by one-half-before it lost its eye the mule was worth 1000 dirhams. "This is a very simple case," said the judge; "take a saw, cut the mule in two, give him the blind half, for which he must pay you 500 dirhams, and keep the other side to yourself." But the man objected to this suggestion, and was therefore fined in 100 dínárs. Then two young men came forward and accused the merchant of having jumped from the roof of a house on to the street below, where there was a commotion, and lighting on their father, had killed him on the spot. The kází asked them whether they thought the roof of the court-house was about the height of the house that the merchant jumped from. They replied that they thought it was; upon which the kází decreed that the merchant should go to sleep on the ground, and that they should get upon the roof and jump down upon him: and that, as the right of blood belonged to them equally, they must take care to jump both at once. They accordingly went upon the roof; but when they looked below they felt alarmed at the height, and so came down again, declaring that if they had ten lives they could not expect to escape. The kází said he could not help that: they had de

manded retaliation, and retaliation they should have; but he could not alter the law to please them. So they gave up their claim, but the kází mulcted them also in the sum of 100 dínárs. This last incident is often found in our own jest-books, thus: A Flemish tyler accidentally fell from the top of a house upon a Spaniard and killed him, though he escaped himself. The next of blood prosecuted his death with great violence against the tyler, and when offered pecuniary recompense, nothing could serve him but lex talionis. Hereupon the judge said to him, if he did insist upon that sentence, he should go up to the top of the same house, and fall down from thence upon the tyler.1 In another version, a tailor, looking at two drunken fellows fighting in the street, fell out of the window and killed an old man, whose son caused him to be apprehended on a charge of murder. When the trial came on, the jury could not bring in a verdict of wilful murder, neither could they acquit him; so they referred the case to the judges, who in their turn referred it to the king; and the king asked George Buchanan's opinion, who said that the tailor should stand below and let the old man's son fall on him.2

Thus many of the tales in our jest-books, which are generally believed to be "racy of the soil," and many of the "good things" ascribed to wits of recent times, are also current as genuine in other countries

1 'A Collection of Jests, Epigrams, Epitaphs,' &c. Edinburgh: 1753. 2 The Witty and Entertaining Exploits of George Buchanan, commonly called the King's Fool.' Leith: 1705.

of Europe, and winged their way from the Far East ages before "Joe Miller" became, what it purports to be, The Wits' Vade Mecum.' Perhaps the best jest in that popular jest-book is the name of Joe Miller on its title-page. It is a common practice in most countries to prefix to a new collection of old jokes the name of some man who was famed for his wit in his day and generation, and to credit him with clever or amusing things which he never did or said: as in the case of the Italian ecclesiastic Arlotto; the German arch-rogue Tyl Eulenspiegel; our English Skelton, George Peele, Dick Tarlton, and Archie Armstrong; the Turkish Khoja Nasr-ed-Din Efendi; and the Indian Temal Ramakistnan, the Scogin of Madras. But it is said that Joe Miller, albeit a comedian by profession, was utterly incapable of making an "original" joke—that he was, in fact, a man of somewhat saturnine disposition: but no matter; the jest-book which has immortalised his name-which his stage career could never have done for him-contains some of the most diverting tales that are to be found in our own or any other language, although he had no more a hand in its compilation than he had in that of the Talmud!

The prototypes of or, at least, parallels to-most European tales of the Gothamite class have been discovered, within quite recent years, in the 'Játakas ' and other Buddhist works. It would probably be

1 I have made a comprehensive collection of Stories of Noodledom, Asiatic as well as European, which is designed, like the present work, VOL. I.

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going too far, however, to maintain that all such tales are of Buddhist invention. There must have existed in India, both orally and in writing, a great mass of stories and fables before the promulgation of Gautama's doctrines; and if the Bráhmans in later ages drew largely from the literary compositions of their enemies, perhaps they were, in some instances, only taking back their own. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that Buddhist literature is peculiarly rich in original tales, apologues, and parables, which owe nothing to the fictions of the earlier Hindús.

But while most of the popular tales of Europe are traceable to ancient Indian sources, and the belief has been long general among scholars that India was the cradle-land of science and literature, the opinion is daily gaining ground that Egypt, not India, was the actual centre from which both the East and the West derived their civilisation. It cannot be denied that there is much more certainty respecting ancient dates in connection with Egyptian history than there is regarding those of any other country; while on the subject of dates all through India, before the time of Alexander's conquest, there is a very inconvenient vagueness. But in Egyptian history we have absolute dates for thousands of years before Christ. The researches of modern Egyptologists have resulted in surprising and most important discoveries, both in monumental inscriptions and in papyri; and

to illustrate the curious migrations of popular fictions; published by Mr Elliot Stock, London: 1886.

when the manuscripts recently unearthed in Egypt have been carefully examined by competent scholars, new facts may be brought to light, to upset some of our present theories as to the origin and diffusion of literature and science.1 That the Indian Vedas' and the grand epics Rámáyana' and 'Mahábhárata' are very old—though certainly not of such high antiquity as was claimed for them by Sir William Jones and other Sanskritists in the last century—is generally admitted by those best qualified to judge, but their date is not positively ascertained. In Egyptian literature, however, there is preserved among the papyri in the British Museum a romance, or fairy tale, of singular interest, of two brothers Anapú and Satú,-the first part of which presents a parallel to the Biblical incident of Joseph and the wife of Potiphar-which was composed in the fourteenth century before Christ, when Pharaoh Ramses Miamun, founder of Pithom

1 "We know," says Sir Richard F. Burton, "that the apologue, the beast-fable proper, is neither Indian nor Esopic: to mention no others, the Lion and the Mouse' is told in a Leyden papyrus. From the Nile banks it was but a step to Phoenicia and Asia Minor, and thence, with the alphabet, the fable went to Greece; while eastward it found a new centre of civilisation in Babylonia and Assyria, lacking, however, the alphabet. When the two great sources were connected by Alexander of Macedon, who completed what Sesostris and Semiramis had begun; when the Medo-Bactrian kingdom was founded, and when the Greeks took moral possession of Persia under the Selucides, then the fable would find its way to India, doubtless meeting there some rude and fantastic kinsman of Buddhistic 'persuasion.' The mingling of blood would produce a fine robust race, and after the second century (A.D.) Indian stories spread over the civilised world, between Rome and China."-The Academy,' June 20, 1885.