Page:The Perfumed Garden - Burton - 1886.djvu/246

 230 involuntary scatters about mistakes which are due to his ignorance and carelessness, but will not shrink from making corrections, modifications, and even additions according to his fancy. The literary reader himself, carried way by the charm of the subject, often annotates the text in margin, inserts an anecdote or idea which is just current, or some puffed-up medical recipe; and all this, to the great detriment of its purity, finds its way into the body of the work through the hands of the next copyist.

There can be no doubt that the work of the Cheikh Nefzaoui has suffered in this way. Our three texts and the one upon which the translator worked, offer striking dissimilarities, and of all kinds; although, by the way, one of the translations seems to approach more nearly in style to the extended text of which we have spoken. But a question of another sort comes before us with respect to this last, which contains more than four times as much it not be possible that a third work, still more complete Cheik Nefzaoui, always bearing in mind the modification to which manuscripts are exposed, and does it so stand by itself as a work for the perusal of voluptuaries, while the others are only abridged copies for the use of the vulgar, serving them as an elementary treatise? Or might it not be the product of numerous successive additions to the original work, by which, as we have already suggested, its bulk has been considered increased.

We have no hesitation in pronouncing in favour of the first of these hypotheses. In the record which the Cheikh gives of it, he says that this is the second work of the kind which he has composed, and that it is in fact only the first one, entitled the "Torch of the Universe,"