Note 371 — KING SHAH BAKHT AND HIS WAZIR AL-RAHWAN.[295]

This famous tale is first found in a small collection of Latin fables (Adolphi Fabulæ apud Leyser Hist. Poet. Medii Ævi, p. 200–8), beginning

Cæcus erat quidam, cui pulcra virago, etc.

The date is 1315, and Caxton printed it in English in 1483; hence it was adopted by Boccaccio, Day vii., Novella 9; whence Chaucer’s “Marchaundes Tale”: this, by-the-by, was translated by Pope in his sixteenth or seventeenth year, and christened “January and May.” The same story is inserted in La Fontaine (Contes, lib. ii., No. 8), “La Gageure des trois Commères,” with the normal poirier; and lastly it appears in Wieland’s “Oberon,” canto vi.; where the Fairy King restores the old husband’s sight, and Titania makes the lover on the pear-tree invisible. Mr. Clouston refers me also to the Bahár-i-Dánish, or Prime of Knowledge (Scott’s translation, vol. ii., pp. 64–68); “How the Brahman learned the Tirrea Bede”; to the Turkish “Kirk Wazir” (Forty Wazirs) of Shaykh-Zadeh (xxivth Wazir’s story); to the “Comœdia Lydiæ,” and to Barbazan’s “Fabliaux et Contes” t. iii., p. 451, “La Saineresse,” the cupping-woman.