The “Conde Lucanor,” the best known of its author’s works, bears some resemblance to the fable of the Knight and the Esquire. It is a collection of forty-nine tales,[106] anecdotes, and apologues, clearly in the Oriental manner; the first hint for which was probably taken from the “Disciplina Clericalis” of Petrus Alphonsus, a collection of Latin stories made in Spain about two centuries earlier. The occasion on which the tales of Don John are supposed to be related is, like the fictions themselves, invented with Eastern simplicity, and reminds us constantly of the “Thousand and One Nights,” and their multitudinous imitations.[107] [106] It seems not unlikely that Don John Manuel intended originally to stop at the end of the twelfth tale; at least, he there intimates such a purpose. [107] That the general form of the Conde Lucanor is Oriental may be seen by looking into the fables of Bidpai, or almost any other collection of Eastern stories; the form, I mean, of separate tales, united by some fiction common to them all, like that of relating them all to amuse or instruct some third person. The first appearance in Europe of such a series of tales grouped together was in the Disciplina Clericalis; a remarkable work, composed by Petrus Alphonsus, originally a Jew, by the name of Moses Sephardi, born at Huesca in Aragon in 1062, and baptized as a Christian in 1106, taking as one of his names that of Alfonso VI. of Castile, who was his godfather. The Disciplina Clericalis, or Teaching for Clerks or Clergymen, is a collection of thirty-seven stories, and many apophthegms, supposed to have been given by an Arab on his death-bed as instructions to his son. It is written in such Latin as belonged to its age. Much of the book is plainly of Eastern origin, and some of it is extremely coarse. It was, however, greatly admired for a long time, and was more than once turned into French verse, as may be seen in Barbazan (Fabliaux, ed. Méon, Paris, 1808, 8vo, Tom. II. pp. 39-183). That the Disciplina Clericalis was the prototype of the Conde Lucanor is probable, because it was popular when the Conde Lucanor was written; because the framework of both is similar, the stories of both being given as counsels; because a good many of the proverbs are the same in both; and because some of the stories in both resemble one another, as the thirty-seventh of the Conde Lucanor, which is the same with the first of the Disciplina. But in the tone of their manners and civilization, there is a difference quite equal to the two centuries that separate the two works. Through the French version, the Disciplina Clericalis soon became known in other countries, so that we find traces of its fictions in the “Gesta Romanorum,” the “Decameron,” the “Canterbury Tales,” and elsewhere. But it long remained, in other respects, a sealed book, known only to antiquaries, and was first printed in