Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 22, 1911.djvu/413

 Reviews. '^yj

Teutonic word Welsh means foreign in England, and in German Italian or gibberish.

The afrit, too, says that he is fed " by the heat of the sun," or, as a variant has it, "for food and drink I have only the simoom and the flame, as the angels for food and drink have the praise and exaltation of Allah." It will be remembered that the jinn are created " from the smokeless fire of the fierce Simoom," as Kenealy puts it. When Abd Es-Samad mounted the ladder to gaze into the City of Brass, he had a cord tied round him which hindered him from throwing himself down to the sirens in the enchanted city, like the soldiers who had mounted the wall before him. On p. 343 we find an extract from Makrizi which reminds us of the Loreley, with a difference.

The volume is both very interesting and very carefully edited and annotated, and we have to regret only that the author has not drawn up a short bibliography of the various works to which he has referred in the course of his commentaries.

W. F. KiRBY.

The Decameron. Its Sources and Analogues. By A. C. Lee. Nutt, 1909. 8vo, pp. xvi + 363.

The Decameron is perhaps the most famous collection of stories of the middle ages in the West, as is the Thousand and One Nights in the East, though it is far less extensive, and is almost confined to tales of intrigues and love adventures. Many of the tales are very ancient, and may be found in India, Greece, Egypt, or elsewhere, while in their turn they have served as a useful storehouse for English and other authors from the time of Chaucer (who was only a little later tlian Boccacio) to La Fontaine and Tennyson, — to mention only three of the best known names of those who have drawn on the Decameron.

Mr. Lee tells us "an attempt has been made in the following pages to give a concise, but as far as possible complete, account of the sources of the tales in Boccacio's Decameron, with notices of the various parallels and analogues." In these few words the