A country fellow (that had not walked much in streets that were paved) came to London, where a dog came suddenly out of a house, and furiously ran at him.  The fellow stooped to pick up a stone to cast at the dog, and finding them all fast rammed or paved in the ground, quoth he, “What a strange country am I in, where the people tie up the stones and let the dogs loose!”

Three centuries and a half before the Water Poet heard this exquisitely humorous story, the great Persian poet Sa’di related it in his Gulistan (or Rose-garden), which was written A.D. 1278: 

A poor poet presented himself before the chief of a gang of robbers, and recited some verses in his praise.  The robber-chief, however, instead of rewarding him, as he fondly expected, ordered him to be stripped of his clothes and expelled from the village.  The dogs attacking him in the rear, the unlucky bard stooped to pick up a stone to throw at them, and finding the stones frozen in the ground, he exclaimed, “What a vile set of men are these, who set loose the dogs and fasten the stones!”

Now here we have a very curious instance of the migration of a popular tale from Persia—­perchance it first set out on its travels from India —­in the thirteenth century, when grave and reverend seigniors wagged their beards and shook their portly sides at its recital, to London in the days of the Scottish Solomon (more properly dubbed “the wisest fool in Christendom"!), when Taylor, the Water Poet, probably heard it told, in some river-side tavern, amidst the clinking of beer-cans and the fragrant clouds blown from pipes of Trinidado, and “put it in his book!” How it came into England it would be interesting to ascertain.  It may have been brought to Europe by the Venetian merchants, who traded largely in the Levant and with the Moors in Northern Africa.

FOOTNOTES: 

[1] Powell and Magnusson’s Legends of Iceland, Second Series, p. 626.

[2] Dictionary of Kashmiri Proverbs and Sayings.  Explained and illustrated from the rich and interesting folk-lore of the Valley.  By the Rev. J. Hinton Knowles.  Bombay:  1885.

[3] This work was composed A.H. 776 (A.D. 1374-5), as the anonymous author takes care to inform us in his opening verses.

[4] A still older form of the story occurs in the Pancha Tantra (Five Sections), a Sanskrit version of the celebrated Fables of Bidpai, in which a gluttonous ram is in the habit of going to the king’s kitchen and devouring all food within his reach.  One of the cooks beat him with a burning log of wood, and the ram rushed off with his blazing fleece and set the horses’ stables on fire, and so forth.  The story is most probably of Buddhist extraction.

[5] A Sinhalese variant of the exploit of the man of Norfolk and of the man of Gotham with the sack of meal.  “See ante, p. 19.” [Transcriber’s note:  this approximates to the text reference for Chapter II Footnote 1 in this etext.]