Page:Vikram and the vampire; or, Tales of Hindu devilry (IA vikramvampireort00burtrich).pdf/22

xiv by name, for the edification of his pupils, the sons of an Indian Raja. They have been adapted to or translated into a number of languages, notably into Pehlvi and Persian, Syriac and Turkish, Greek and Latin, Hebrew and Arabic. And as the Fables of Pilpay, are generally known, by name at least, to European litterateurs. Voltaire remarks, 'Quand on fait réflexion que presque toute la terre a été infatuée de pareils contes, et qu'ils ont fait l'éducation du genre humain, on trouve les fables de Pilpay, Lokman, d'Ésope bien raisonnables.'

These tales, detached, but strung together by artificial means ― pearls with a thread drawn through them ― are manifest precursors of the Decamerone, or Ten Days. A modern Italian critic describes the now classical fiction as a collection of one hundred of those novels which Boccaccio is believed to have read out at the court of Queen Joanna of Naples, and which later in life were by him assorted together by a most simple and ingenious contrivance. But the great Florentine invented neither his stories nor his 'plot,' if we may so call it. He wrote in the middle of the fourteenth century (1344–8) when the West had borrowed many things