A most significant point to be noted is that India is the scene of the story. In 1850 Steinschneider discovered the truth. And a surprising truth it is. The same story was known to medieval Christians as the _Romance of Barlaam and Josaphat_. But the whole is nothing more or less than an account of the life of Buddha, the great Indian saint, the founder of a religion. Jews, Mohammedans, and Christians revelled in the story without having a notion as to its original significance. Nothing so brings races and creeds together as a good tale. The folk are united by their common interest in the same lore. Mr. Zangwill, in his beautiful poem prefixed to Dr. Jacobs’ edition of _Barlaam and Josaphat_, looks deeper, and finds in the general admiration for this legend a symbol of the universal identity of men’s aspirations for the ideal. Was Barlaam truly Josaphat, And Buddha truly each? What better parable than that The unity to preach-- The simple brotherhood of souls That seek the highest good; He who in kingly chariot rolls, Or wears the hermit’s hood! Bar Hisdai felt nothing of this religious cosmopolitanism. But he realized that devotion to a spiritual ideal was a lesson he might profitably present to his age in the guise of allegory. If, however, Bar Hisdai chose the story for its moral, his readers we may be certain swallowed the moral because of the story--rather, one should say, the stories. It is remarkable that the Hebrew version is much fuller in its parables, containing, as Dr. Jacobs estimates, no less than ten not found in the other versions. Even Bar Hisdai must, after all, have been drawn to the parables as such, else why add to their number? At all events, so far as his readers went, the _Prince and Dervish_ made its appeal by its stories rather than by its doctrines. And what stories they are! Several of the world’s classics are in _Barlaam_, the sources of more than one of the best known dramas of later ages, some of the favorite parables of the world, immortal as human life itself. Bar Hisdai omits the caskets, which Shakespeare used in the _Merchant of Venice_, and the “Three Friends” (wealth, family, good deeds), the last of which alone accompanies a man to the grave, the plot of that famous morality play, _Everyman_. The omission is curious, for both of these tales are found in the Midrash. But Bar Hisdai gives us the original of King Cophetua--the beggar-maid who weds the king. Bar Hisdai alone gives us the story of “The Robbers’ Nemesis”--the two who plot to rob the traveller, but, envying each the other his share in the spoil, each poisons the other rascal’s food, and the traveller escapes. He also alone tells of the “Greedy Dog,” who, in his anxiety to attend two wedding breakfasts on the same day, misses both. But we cannot go through all. One other, found only in Bar Hisdai, is thus summarized by Dr. Jacobs: A king, hunting, invites a shepherd to eat with him in the heat of the day: