Page:The Perfumed Garden - Burton - 1886.djvu/251

Rh not much more advanced than was the former. Although our contact with the race becomes closer every day in Tunis, Morocco, Egypt, and other Mussulman countries, they hold to their old medical prescriptions, have the same belief in divination, and honour the same mass of ridiculous notions, in which sorcery and amulets play a large part, and which appear to us supremely absurd. At the same time, one may observe from the very passages which we here refer to, that this people was not so averse as one might believe to witticisms, for the pun (calembour) occupies an important position in the explanation of dreams with which the author has studied the chapters on the sexual organs, apparently for no particular reason but no doubt with the idea that no matter of interest should be absent from his work.

The reader will perhaps also find that probability is frequently sacrificed to imagination. This is a distinct mark of the Arabic literature, and our work could not otherwise but exhibit the faults inherent to the genius of this race, which revels in the love for the marvellous, and amongst whose chief literary productions are to be counted the "Thousand and One Nights." But if these tales show such defaults very glaringly, they exhibit on the other hand, charming qualities, simplicity, grace, delicacy; a mine of precious things which has been explored and made use of by modern authors. We have pointed out, in some notes, the relationship which we found between these tales and those of Boccaccio and La Fontaine, but we could not draw attention to all. We had to pass over many with silence, and amongst them, some of the most striking, as for instance in the case of "The Man Expert in Stratagems Duped by his Wife," which we find reproduced with all the perfect mastership