xi
finished by the hand of the humblest of His[1] servants in the habit of a minister of religion (Kahin, lit. a diviner, Cohen), the [Christian] priest Dionysius Shawish, a scion (selil) of the College of the Romans (Greeks, Europeans or Franks, er Roum), by name St. Athanasius, in Rome the Greatest (or Greater, utsma, fem. of aatsem, quære Constantinople?) on the seven-and-twentieth of the month Shubat (February) of the year one thousand seven hundred fourscore and seven, [he being] then teacher of the Arabic tongue in the Library of the Sultan, King of France, at Paris the Greatest.”
From this somewhat incoherent note we may assume that the MS. was written in the course of the year 1787 by the notorious Syrian ecclesiastic Dom Denis Chavis, the accomplice of Cazotte in the extraordinary literary atrocity shortly afterward perpetrated by the latter under the name of a sequel or continuation of the Thousand and One Nights[2] (v. Cabinet des Fées, vols.
- ↑ i.e. God’s.
- ↑ “La suite des Mille et une Nuits, Contes Arabes traduits par Dom Chavis et M. Cazotte. Paris 1788.” The Edinburgh Review (July, 1886) gives the date of the first edition as 1785; but this is an error, probably founded upon the antedating of a copy of the Cabinet des Fées, certain sets of which (though not actually completed till 1793) are dated, for some publisher’s reason. 1785. See also following note.
