69
head with hood of marten skins, each side whereof had the resemblance of an ape’s face, sprucified up with ears of pasted paper, and having about his neck a bucked ruff, raised, furrowed, and ridged, with pointing sticks of the shape and fashion of small organ pipes, he first with all the force of his lungs coughed two or three times, and then with an audible voice pronounced this following sentence. The Court declareth, that the porter, who ate his bread at the smoke of the roast, hath civilly paid the cook with sound of his money. And the said Court ordaineth, that every one return to his own home, and attend his proper business, without costs and charges, and for a cause. This verdict, award, and arbitrament of the Parisian Fool did appear so equitable, yea, so admirable to the aforesaid Doctors, that they very much doubted if the matter had been brought before the Sessions for Justice of the said place, or that the judges of the Rota at Rowe had been umpires therein, or yet that the Areopagites themselves had been the deciders thereof, by any one part, or all of them together, had been so judicially sententiated and awarded. Therefore advise if you will be counselled by a fool.”
I have no means at present of tracing this story in its migration. It is one likely enough to have gone all over the world. But the question arises here, as in the case of the story of the man with the wen, have the Japanese received it in comparatively recent times, whether by way of China or from Arabian or Indian merchants, or later from Portuguese or Dutch missionaries or merchants; or does it belong to the most ancient cycle of Turanian legend, which may have existed all over Asia and Europe in times long antecedent to tie dawn of history?
Recent discoveries have tended to show that the story of the Deluge and others which had previously passed for Shemitic or Aryan are really of Turanian origin, or at least were in the possession of Turanian tribes before they were current among Shemites or Aryans.
It is possible that further enquiries into the Japanese legends may throw some further light upon this strange
