Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 4.djvu/331

 12 S. IV. DEC., 1918.]

NOTES AND QUERIES.

325

BACON, ESSAY XII. : MOHAMMED AND THE MOUNTAIN. In vol. i. of the Eleventh Series of ' N. & Q.' there was a discussion as to the origin of the proverbial saying about Mohammed and the mountain. Bacon's use of the legend in his essay ' Of Boldnesse ' was quoted on p. 151 ; and in a later com- munication (p. 231) Dr. Aldis Wright's note was given, in which, after stating that he had been unable to trace any foundation for the story, he described the saying art a common Spanish proverb, citing the iform in which it appears in Bacon's ' Promus,' fol. 20b, " Se no va el otero a Mahoma vaya Mahoma al otero," and adding that,

" in a letter from Antonio Perez to the Earl of Essex, it is quoted in exactly the converse form : " Tu videris quo id modo net, an ego ad templum, an, ut solebant loqui Hispani Mauri, si no puede yr Mahoma a Lotero (i.e. al otero), venga Lotero {i.-e., el otero) a Mahoma, templum cum aliqua occasione hue se conferat ' (' Ant. Perezii ad Com. Essexium. . . . epistolarum centuria una,' OSTiirnberg, 1683, ep. 14, p 18) "

But the 25th edition of Biichmann's " Gefliigelte Worte ' (neu bearbeitet von Uogdan Krieger, 1912), p. 322\ for the source of the saying " Wenn der Berg nicht zum Propheten kommen will, muss der Prophet 'zum Berge gehen," refers to Rene Basset's Introduction to ' Les Fourberies de Si Djeh'a : Contes Kabyles rec. et trad. p. Aug' Moulieras,' Paris, 1892, p. 72, where " If the palm-trere does not come to Dschocha, Dschocha will go to the palm-tree," is quoted from an Arabic version (probably of the year 1631) of a Turkish edition based on An earlier Arabic collection of ' Anecdotes of Chodja Nas'reddin Dschocha er Rumi ' (experts may substitute the English fashion in transliterating), described as the Ma- hometan Eulenspiegel. The reader is referred to p. 3 of Basset's Introduction, and to D. Simonsen in the Zeitschri/t fur Biicherfreunde, 7, 1903/4, Beiblatt, p. 2.

Aldis Wright's note is cited in ' Gefliigelte Worte ' to illustrate the form of the saying in which Mohammed is introduced, and a reference given to Aloys Sprenger's ' Leben -und Lehre des Mohammad,' Berlin, 1861, i. 545, according to which the legend is toased on a prophecy in the Koran, 52, 10 (presumably " On that day the heaven shall be shaken, and shall reel ; and the mountains shall walk and pass away," Sale's transl.). 1 Corinthians xiii. 2 is said to have supplied the first hint ; to which should be, added Matt. xvii. 20, xxi. 21, and Mark xi. 23.

EDWARD BENSLY.

DANTE'S LATIN WORKS, " THE TEMPLE CLASSICS " EDITION. I have just been using a translation of the Latin works of Dante issued in " The Temple Classics " by Messrs. J. M. Dent & Co. in 1804, and have struck upon three errors of small import- ance, except that they may easily be used by historical students without further veri- fication, and it may therefore be well to call attention to them.

1. In the Qucestio \ve have a translation" of Latin in which, on pp. 422 and 423, Dante gives the date 1320, Sunday, the seventh from the Ides of January and the thirteenth before the Kalends of February. The note says : " I.e. 20th January, which was, in fact, a Sunday in the year 1320." This is correct. Unfortunately, by some curious chance the English translation gives "the fourteenth" in error for "the thir- teenth."

2. On p. 314 the date of Dante's sixth letter is given as February 28th ; the tex* on p. 322 gives " the day before the Kalends of April." This is March 31.

3. On p. 314 the date of Dante's seventh letter is given as April 16. On p. 330 the text says " fourteen days before the Kalends of May." This is April 18.

T. NICKLIN. Hulme Hall, Manchester.

' ADAM BEDE ' : DISCREPANCY IN DATES. In the first paragraph of the first chapter of ' Adam Bede ' the story is started on the precise date of June 18, 1799. This was a Tuesday. That evening Dinah Morris preaches on the village green. Mr. Joshua Rann, parish clerk, comes to hear her, but with disapproval, which he expresses by saying

" in a resounding bass undertone, ' Sehon, King of the Amorites : for His mercy edureth for ever ; and Og, the King of Basan : for His mercy endureth for ever ' a quotation which may seem to have slight bearing on the present occasion, but, as with every other anomaly, adequate knowledge will show it to be a natural sequence. Mr. Rann was inwardly maintaining the dignity of the Church in the face of this scandalous irruption of Methodism, and as that dignity was bound up with his own sonorou utterance of the responses, his argument natur- ally suggested a quotation from the psalm he had read the last Sunday afternoon " (chap. ii).

Now " the last Sunday afternoon " must be June 16, and unhappily the 136th Psalm belongs to the evening service, not of that day, but of the 28th of the month. It is strange that so careful a writer, after being so needlessly definite in her dates, should not have checked them. H. K. ST. J. S.