Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/338

304 thirteenth, if not in the twelfth century; but, as the passage stands, the work referred to appears to be the lost Arabic version of the lost Hezar Efsan. El Mecrizi, who lived but a hundred and fifty years after Ibn Saïd, is much less likely than El Meccari, whom more than twice that time separated from the age of the Granadan historian, to have erred in citing from the latter’s work, and the reasons before stated in support of the theory that the Thousand and One Nights were originally composed in the fourteenth century appear to me to preclude the possibility that the discrepancy in the two passages quoted is owing to an error on the part of the author or copyist of the Khitet and that the work referred to in the latter as the Thousand Nights could have been the extant collection. The fact that Hajji Khelfeh, in his great Bibliographical Dictionary, composed at the end of the seventeenth century, names (and only names) the Thousand Nights and makes no mention of the Thousand and One, which has been adduced as an argument in favour of the probability of the identity of the two works, seems to me rather to tell against the theory, as it is evident, from the note appended to Galland’s MS. and from El Meccari’s history, that the collection known as the Thousand and One Nights bore that name long before Hajji Khelfeh’s time, whilst the latter, with the proverbial contempt of the Oriental (and too often, indeed, of the European) savant for romantic literature, would have been almost certain to discard the comparatively modern Thousand and One Nights as a mere collection of “silly stories” (to quote the words of the author of the Fihrist