Note 83 — Chapter III · (continued 2)

Note 83. Some of the incidents described in this story, as the shipwrecks caused by the image, and the opening of the forbidden closet, &c., appear to be taken from the romance of Seyf Zu-l-Yezen, of which I possess a copy, purchased during my second visit to Egypt. This romance, which has become extremely scarce, is filled with stories of genii and enchantments of the most extravagant kind. Some of the public story-tellers in Cairo used, a few years since, to amuse their audiences by recitations from it. I was not able to discover the period at which it was composed; but it is said to have been written long before the Tales of a Thousand and One Nights. I saw once a portion of a copy of which it appeared, from the hand-writing and the paper, to be three or four centuries old.