Page:Curiosities of Olden Times.djvu/251

King Robert of Sicily has been translated into French, Italian, English, Russian, and Polish. The mummy wheat was soon multiplied.

The legend of King Robert of Sicily, which the American poet has rescued from oblivion, is one of those few which can be traced with rare precision through its various changes, and tracked to the country where it originated. It is instructive to note how in one form, it did service in the cause of one religion, and how, in another form, it pointed a striking moral in behalf of an entirely different creed.

Two methods of procedure lie open to us in the examination of this story, analysis and synthesis. We might trace the legend back from the form in which it is known to the modern public, by sure stages, to the ultimate atoms out of which it is developed, or we might take the original germ, and follow it in its expanding and varying forms, till it has assumed its present shape in the pages of the Tales of a Wayside Inn.

We shall adopt the latter method, as the most suitable in this peculiar instance.

In the Pantschatantra, a Sanscrit collection of popular tales, the date of the compilation of which is uncertain, but that of the tales is unquestionably earlier than the Christian era, is the following story:

"In the town of Liavati, lived a king, called Mukunda. One day he saw a hunchback performing such comical actions that he invited him to 239