Note 30 — ORIENTAL WIT AND HUMOUR.

A similar incident is found in the 8th chapter of the Spanish work, El Conde Lucanor, written, in the 14th century, by Prince Don Juan Manuel, where a pretended alchemist obtains from a king a large sum of money in order that he should procure in his own distant country a certain thing necessary for the transmutation of the baser metals into gold. The impostor, of course, did not return, and so on, much the same as in the above.—Many others of Don Manuel’s tales are traceable to Eastern sources; he was evidently familiar with the Arabic language, and from his long intercourse with the Moors doubtless became acquainted with Asiatic story-books. His manner of telling the stories is, however, wholly his own, and some of them appear to be of his own invention.—There is a variant of the same story in Pasquils Jests and Mother Bunches Merriments, in which a servant enters his master’s name in a list of all the fools of his acquaintance, because he had lately lent his cousin twenty pounds. Return