to the king, she, together with her sister Dunyazad, so engrosses his mind with her stories that the king seeks their continuance night after night; thus she wards off her fate for nearly three years.  At the end of that time she has borne the king three male children; and has, by the sprightliness of her mind, gradually drawn all the conceit out of him, so that his land is at rest.  The tales told within this frame may be divided into:  (a) Histories, or long romances, which are often founded upon historical facts; (b) Anecdotes and short stories, which deal largely with the caliphs of the house of Abbas; (c) Romantic fiction, which, though freely mingled with supernatural intervention, may also be purely fictitious (contes fantastiques); (d) Fables and Apologues; (e) Tales, which serve the teller as the peg upon which to hang and to exhibit his varied learning.  In addition to this “frame,” there is a thread running through the whole; for the grand theme which is played with so many variations is the picturing of love—­in the palace and in the hovel, in the city and in the desert.  The scenes are laid in all the four corners of the globe, but especially in the two great centres of Muhammadan activity, Bagdad and Cairo.  It is not a matter of chance that Harun al-Rashid is the Caliph to whom the legends of the ‘Nights’ have given a crown so very different from the one which he really wore.  Though his character was often far from that which is pictured here, he was still a patron of art and of literature.  His time was the heyday of Muhammadan splendor; and his city was the metropolis to which the merchants and the scholars flocked from the length and breadth of Arab dominion.

To unravel the literary history of such a collection is difficult indeed, for it has drawn upon all civilizations and all literatures.  But since Hammer-Purgstall and De Sacy began to unwind the skein, many additional turns have been given.  The idea of the “frame” in general comes undoubtedly from India; and such stories as ’The Barber’s Fifth Brother,’ ‘The Prince and the Afrit’s Mistress,’ have been “traced back to the Hitopadesa, Panchatantra, and Katha Sarit Sagara.”  The ’Story of the King, his Seven Viziers, his Son, and his Favorite,’ is but a late version, through the Pahlavi, of the Indian Sindibad Romance of the time of Alexander the Great.  A number of fables are easily paralleled by those in the famous collection of Bidpai (see the list in Jacobs’s ’The Fables of Bidpai,’ London, 1888, lxviii.).  This is probably true of the whole little collection of beast fables in the One Hundred and Forty-sixth Night; for such fables are based upon the different reincarnations of the Buddha and the doctrine of metempsychosis.  The story of Jali’ad and the Vizier Shammas is distinctly reported to have been translated from the Persian into Arabic.  Even Greek sources have not been left untouched, if the picture of the cannibal in the adventures of Sindbad the Sailor be really a reflex of the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus.  Arabic historians—­such as Tabari, Masudi, Kazwini, al-Jauzi—­and the Kitab al-Aghani, have furnished innumerable anecdotes and tales; while such old Arabic poets as Imr al-Kais, Alkamah, Nabhighah, etc., have contributed occasional verses.