nobody could tell him where a certain Mirza Schaffy lay buried.  At last, in 1870, the Russian counsellor Adolph Berge gave an authentic account of the real man and his literary activity.[206] Two things were clearly established:  first, that such a person as Mirza Safi’ had really existed; second, that this person was no poet.  On this second point the few scraps of verse which Berge had been able to collect, and which he submitted in the essay cited above, leave absolutely no doubt.  So, in 1874, when Bodenstedt published another poetic collection of Mirza Schaffy, he appended an essay wherein he explained clearly the origin and the nature of the original collection bearing that name.

According to his own statements, these poems are not translations.  They are entirely his own,[207] and were originally not an independent collection, but part of the biographical romance Tausend und ein Tag im Orient.[208] This should be kept in mind if we wish to estimate them at their true value.

Nevertheless the poems are genuinely Oriental and owe their existence to the author’s stay in the East, particularly in Tiflis, during the winter 1843-44.  But for this residence in the Orient, so Bodenstedt tells us,[209] a large part of them would never have seen the light.

In form, however, they are Occidental—­the gazal being used only a few times (e.g. ii. 135, or in the translations from Hafid in chap. 21:  ii. 70=H. 8; ii. 72=H. 155, etc.) In spirit they are like Hafid.  “Mein Lehrer ist Hafis, mein Bethaus ist die Schenke,” so Mirza Schaffy himself proclaims (i. p. 96), and images and ideas from Hafid, familiar to us from preceding chapters, meet us everywhere.  The stature like a cypress, the nightingale and the rose, the verses like pearls on a string, and others could be cited as instances.  Other authors are also laid under contribution; thus the comparison of Mirza Schaffy to a bee seems to have been suggested by a maxim of Sa’di (Gul. viii.  No. 77, ed.  Platts; K.S. p. 268), where a wise man without practice is called a bee without honey, and the thought in the last verse of “Die Rose auch” (vol. ii. p. 85), that the rose cannot do without dirt and the nightingale feeds on worms, is a reminiscence of a story of Nidami which we had occasion to cite in the chapter on Rueckert (see p. 43).  In one case a poem contains a Persian proverb.  Mirza Schaffy criticises the opinions of the Shah’s viziers in the words:  “Ich hoere das Geklapper einer Muehle, doch sehe ich kein Mehl” (i, 85), a literal rendering of

     [Arabic]

Of course the mullas and hypocrites in general are roundly scored, especially in chapter 27, where the sage, angered by the reproaches which the mustahid has made to him for his bad conduct and irreligious poetry, gives vent to his sentiments of disgust in a number of poems (vol. ii. p. 137 seq.).  Bodenstedt undoubtedly had in mind the persecutions to which Hafid was subject, culminating in the refusal of the priests to give him regular burial and giving rise to the famous story of the fatva.