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xiii the fact that the Syrian ecclesiastic seems, with the characteristic want of taste and presumption which might be expected from the joint-author of “Les Veillées Persanes,” to have, to a considerable extent, garbled the original text by the introduction of modern European phrases and turns of speech à la Galland. For the rest, the MS. contains no note or other indication, on which we can found any opinion as to the source from which the transcriber (or arranger) drew his materials; but it can hardly be doubted, from internal evidence, that he had the command of some genuine text of the Nights, similar to, if not identical with, that of Galland, which he probably “arranged” to suit his own (and his century’s) distorted ideas of literary fitness. The discovery of the interpolated tales contained in this MS. (which has thus presumably lain unnoticed for a whole century, under, as one may say, the very noses of the many students of Arabic literature who would have rejoiced in such a find) has, by a curious freak of fortune, been delayed until our own day in consequence of a singular mistake made by a former conservator of the Paris Bibliothèque, the well-known Orientalist, M. Reinaud, who, in drawing up the Catalogue of the Arabic MSS. in the collection,