Note 55 — ADDITIONAL LETTERS.

The story in question is one of the many derivatives from the Third Calender’s Story in The Thousand and One Nights and the somewhat similar tale of “The Man who laughed not,” included in the Notes to Lane’s Arabian Nights and in the text of Payne’s magnificent version of the complete work. I am indebted to Dr. Reinhold Köhler, Librarian of the Grand-ducal Library of Weimar, for identifying the particular variant referred to by Keats as the “Histoire de la Corbeille,” in the Nouveaux Contes Orientaux of the Comte de Caylus. Mr. Morris’s beautiful poem “The Man who never laughed again,” in The Earthly Paradise, has familiarized to English readers one variant of the legend.