Note 4 — INTRODUCTION.

Perhaps one of the most curious instances of the migrations of popular tales is the following. In Taylor’s Wit and Mirth, an excellent jest-book, compiled by the celebrated Water-Poet (temp. James I of England), we are told of a countryman who had come up to London on a visit, and some wags having set a big dog at him in sport, the poor fellow stooped to pick up a stone to throw at the brute, but finding them all rammed hard and fast into the ground, he exclaimed in astonishment: “What strange folk are these, who fasten the stones and let loose their dogs!” More than three centuries before Taylor heard this jest, the Persian poet Sa`dī related it in his Gulistān, or Rose-Garden (ch. iv, story 10 of Eastwick’s translation): “A poet went to the chief of a band of robbers, and recited a panegyric upon him. He commanded them to strip off his clothes, and turn him out of the village. The dogs, too, attacked him in the rear. He wanted to take up a stone, but the ground was frozen. Unable to do anything, he said: ‘What a villanous set are these, who have untied their dogs, and tied up the stones!’”—Here we have a jest, at the recital of which, in the 14th century, “grave and otiose” Easterns wagged their beards and shook their portly sides, finding its way, three centuries later, to London taverns, where Taylor probably heard it told amidst the clinking of cans and fragrant clouds blown from pipes of Trinidado! But how came it thither?—that is the question.