We have here a unique form of the wide-spread tale of “The Lion’s Track,” which, while it omits the husband’s part, yet reflects the virtuous wife’s rebuke of the enamoured sultan.

The singer and the druggist, p. 219.

If Straparola’s version is to be considered as an adaptation of Ser Giovanni’s novella—­ which I do not think very probable—­it must be allowed to be an improvement on his model.  In the Arabian story the singer is first concealed in a mat, next in the oven, and again in the mat, after which he escapes by clambering over the parapet of the druggist’s roof to that of an adjoining house, and his subsequent adventures seem to be added from a different story.  In Ser Giovanni’s version the lover is first hid beneath a heap of half dried clothes, and next behind the street door, from which he escapes the instant the husband enters, and the latter is treated as a madman by the wife’s relatives and the neighbours—­an incident which has parallels in other tales of women’s craft and its prototype, perhaps, in the story of the man who compiled a book of the Wiles of Woman, as told in “Syntipas,” the Greek version of the Book of Sindibad.  In Straparola the lover—­as in the Arabian story—­is concealed three times, first in a basket, then between two boardings, and lastly in a chest containing law papers; and the husband induces him to recount his adventures in presence of the lady’s friends, which having concluded, the lover declares the story to be wholly fictitious:  this is a much more agreeable ending than that of Giovanni’s story, and, moreover, it bears a close analogy to the latter part of the Persian tale, where the lover exclaims he is right glad to find it all a dream.  Straparola’s version has another point of resemblance in the Persian story—­so far as can be judged from Scott’s abstract—­and also in the Arabian story:  the lover discovers the lady by chance, and is not advised to seek out some object of love, as in Giovanni; in the Arabian the singer is counselled by the druggist to go about and entertain wine parties.  Story-comparers have too much cause to be dissatisfied with Jonathan Scott’s translation of the “Bahar-i- Danish”—­a work avowedly derived from Indian sources—­although it is far superior to Dow’s garbled version.  The abstracts of a number of the tales which Scott gives in an appendix, while of some use, are generally tantalising:  some stories he has altogether omitted “because they are similar to tales already well known” (unfortunately the comparative study of popular fictions was hardly begun in his time), while of others bare outlines are furnished, because he considered them “unfit for general perusal.”  But his work, even as it is, has probably never been “generally” read, and he seems to have had somewhat vague notions of “propriety,” to judge by his translations from the Arabic and Persian.  A complete English rendering of the “Bahar-i-Danish” would be welcomed by all interested in the history of fiction.