The Nights, I have said, belongs to the days before coffee (A.D. 1550) and tobacco (A.D. 1650) had overspread the East.  The former, which derives its name from the Kafa or Kaffa province, lying south of Abyssinia proper and peopled by the Sidama Gallas, was introduced to Mokha of Al-Yaman in A.D. 1429-30 by the Shaykh al-Shazili who lies buried there, and found a congenial name in the Arabic Kahwah=old wine.[FN#191] In The Nights (Mac.  Edit.) it is mentioned twelve times[FN#192]; but never in the earlier tales:  except in the case of Kamar al-Zaman ii. it evidently does not belong to the epoch and we may fairly suspect the scribe.  In the xvith century coffee began to take the place of wine in the nearer East; and it gradually ousted the classical drink from daily life and from folk-tales.

It is the same with tobacco, which is mentioned only once by The Nights (cmxxxi.), in conjunction with meat, vegetables and fruit and where it is called “Tabah.”  Lane (iii. 615) holds it to be the work of a copyist; but in the same tale of Abu Kir and Abu Sir, sherbet and coffee appear to have become en vogue, in fact to have gained the ground they now hold.  The result of Lord Macartney’s Mission to China was a suggestion that smoking might have originated spontaneously in the Old World.[FN#193] This is un-doubtedly true.  The Bushmen and other wild tribes of Southern Africa threw their Dakha (cannabis indica) on the fire and sat round it inhaling the intoxicating fumes.  Smoking without tobacco was easy enough.  The North American Indians of the Great Red Pipe Stone Quarry and those who lived above the line where nicotiana grew, used the kinni-kinik or bark of the red willow and some seven other succedanea.[FN#194] But tobacco proper, which soon superseded all materials except hemp and opium, was first adopted by the Spaniards of Santo Domingo in A.D. 1496 and reached England in 1565.  Hence the word, which, amongst the so-called Red Men, denoted the pipe, the container, not the contained, spread over the Old World as a generic term with additions, like ’’Tutun,’’[FN#195] for special varieties.  The change in English manners brought about by the cigar after dinner has already been noticed; and much of the modified sobriety of the present day may be attributed to the influence of the Holy Herb en cigarette.  Such, we know from history was its effect amongst Moslems; and the normal wine-parties of The Nights suggest that the pipe was unknown even when the latest tales were written.

C.

We know absolutely nothing of the author or authors who produced our marvellous Recueil.  Galland justly observes (Epist.  Dedic.), “probably this great work is not by a single hand; for how can we suppose that one man alone could own a fancy fertile enough to invent so many ingenious fictions?” Mr. Lane, and Mr. Lane alone, opined that the work was written in Egypt by one person or at most by two, one ending what the other had begun, and that he or