caccio, and all those ladies with significant names first met in Passion-week, and who die so strangely, all before their lovers, as having more the air of abstraction than of reality. I also think it by no means unlikely that the Ghibellines were a secret society, and had a gergo, or conventional language, understood only by themselves. I have had occasion to make some inquiries into the subject of secret societies; and perhaps things which prove stumbling-blocks to others are plain and easy to me.

Let not, then, my excellent friend despond: truth is great, and will prevail; and if his system of interpretation be founded in truth, as I believe it is, his name will go down to the most remote posterity coupled with that of one of the greatest poets that have ever existed. To few is such glory given !

It is now more than a century and a quarter since Europe became, through M. Galland's French translation, acquainted with the Thousand and One Nights', the Elf Leila wa Leila of the Arabs -that marvellous collection of tales which has afforded more delight to mankind than perhaps any other product of the human imagination. The avidity with which these tales were read almost exceeds belief; they were speedily translated into other European languages; the adventures of Sindbad, Aladdin, Agib, and the other heroes of these brilliant fictions, became as familiar and as attractive in the West as they were in the East; and by a curious casualty, the same tale might be listened to at the same moment in the Syrian or Egyptian coffee-house, the Bedoween circle, and the French or British cottage. We are told that in Paris parties used at night to stop before the house in which

1 Or Arabian Nights' Entertainments, as the Grub-street worthy who was employed to do them into English chose to entitle them.

M. Galland resided, wake him up from his sleep, and insist on his relating to them a story.

It is needless to ask whence the charms of the e tales arise: the wonderful will always have attractions, brilliant imagination will always assert its power; and the circumstance of our religion, and the volume in which it is contained, being derived from the East, raises in the youthful mind an early predilection for that part of the world. The East, we are taught, contained the blissful Paradise of man's infancy and innocence, which the genius of Milton has filled with all that can yield delight. It was in the East that Abraham and the succeeding patriarchs led that life of pastoral ease and abundance so dear to the imagination of ingenuous youth.

"Those pleased the most where by a cunning hand
Depicted was the patriarchal age;

What time Dan Abraham left the Chaldee land

And pastured on from verdant stage to stage,
Where fields and fountains fresh could best engage.
Toil was not then: of nothing took they heed
But with wild beasts the silvan war to wage,
And o'er vast plains their herds and flocks to feed.
Blest sons of nature they! true golden age indeed!"

The East was the scene of the sweet tale of Ruth, and of the interesting adventures of David. It was, in fact, the land of miracle and wonder, favoured with the choicest regards of the Deity; and imagination has always invested its front with a nimbus of splendour. Such, at least, were my own early impressions of the East; and I should suppose I

am but one of the many. The Thousand and One Nights, and similar collections, come to augment this illusion; the noble Vision of Mirza and other fictions of the same kind lend their aid; and I apprehend there are few persons fond of reading who have not exaggerated ideas of the magnificence and beauty of that part of the world lurking in the recesses of their imagination. Nor is this illusion (as those who have lost it well know,) to be deplored. Many are the dark and cloudy days of life; and most happy is he for whom they are most frequently gilded by the rays of fancy. And the brilliant fictions of the East, and the popular tales which amused our childhood, and still recall its pleasures, have in this the advantage over the modern novel,-they go at once beyond the regions of probability, and cannot therefore injure by exciting romantic expectations of the fortune of the hero or heroine being realised in ourselves. This power of yielding innocuous pleasure they share with the higher order of poetry, a taste for which has never, I believe, proved anything but beneficial to any mind whatever.

In Europe we read these tales; in the East, where the printing-press is unknown, they are

1 Few have a clear conception of the evils produced by indiscriminate novel-reading. Sir Walter Scott, with his usual felicity, compares novels to opiates. These of course should be used with extreme moderation; but, alas! I fear that the number of our opium-eaters is considerable. Was he then totally blameless who supplied so much of the seductive drug, and gave dignity to the use of it?

mostly listened to from the lips of the story-teller. The manner in which the story-teller by profession enacts his narrative to the idle loungers in the coffee-house, or to the crowd in the streets, has often been described; but few have an adequate conception of the eager attention and breathless interest with which the unsophisticated children of the desert listen to tales of love, of war, and of wonder. I will therefore, in the words of an eyewitness, place a Bedoween audience and storyteller on the scene.

"When the burning sun," says M. von Hammer 2, "has sunk behind the sand-hills, and the thirsty ground is licking up and swallowing the cooling dew, they no less greedily swallow the tales and fables which they have perhaps already heard a hundred times, but which nevertheless— thanks to the mobility of their imagination and the expertness of the narrator-operate on them with all the force of novelty.

"One should see these children of the desert, how they are moved and agitated, how they melt away in feeling and flame up in rage, how they fall into an agony and then recover their

1 See Jon. Scott's Introduction to his edition of the Arabian Nights, Hajji Baba, Sketches of Persia, &c.

2 In a review of the English translation of Antar in the Vienna Jahrbücher der Literatur, vol. vi. Whenever I have to treat of matters concerning the East, I am always deeply indebted to the writings of this distinguished orientalist, with whose friendship and correspondence I am honoured.