the information of one of the prince’s enviers, and cautioning the people against entertaining aught but reverence for the strangers. This amusing episode is omitted in the Turkish version. In one point the tale of Zayn al-Asnam has the advantage of that of Abd es-Samed: it is much more natural, or congruous, that the King of the Genii should affect to require the chaste maiden and give the prince a magical mirror which would test her purity, and that the freed slave Mubarak should accompany the prince in his quest. _ALADDIN; OR, THE WONDERFUL LAMP—p. 52._ Those scholars who declared a number of the tales in Galland’s “Mille et une Nuits” to be of his own invention, because they were not found in any of the Arabic MS. texts of The Nights preserved in European libraries, were unconsciously paying that learned and worthy man a very high compliment, since the tales in question are among the best in his work and have ever been, and probably will continue to be, among the most popular favourites. But the fact that Galland seized the first opportunity of intimating that two of those tales were not translated or inserted by himself ought to have been alone amply sufficient presumptive evidence of his good faith with regard to the others. A friendly reviewer of my “Popular Tales and Fictions” etc. states that modern collectors of European _Märchen_, though “working from 100 to 150 years after the appearance of the ‘Thousand and One Nights,’ in European literature, have not found the special versions therein contained distributed widely and profusely throughout Europe,” and that my chapter on Aladdin is proof sufficient that they have not done so. The reviewer goes on to say that I cite “numerous variants, but, save one from Rome, variants of the _theme_, not of the _version_; some again, such as the Mecklenburg and Danish forms, are more primitive in tone; and all lack those effective and picturesque details which are the charm of the Arabian story, and which a borrower only interested in the story as a story might just be expected to retain.”[134]