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in ten or at most fifteen years to destroy the strongest man, and that the ashes of the drug thus fatally inhaled by the rich may be resold to the poor and swallowed with equal effect. The usual dose of opium for a beginner is from ten to twenty grains, which being inhaled or swallowed produces in a short time the wild but transitory delirium for which they are willing to sacrifice fortune, health, and even life. While under the effects of the drug the whole frame is violently agitated, the pulse accelerated, and the general heat of the body increased, the breath quick and sudden, the eyes bright and restless, and in short every vital function excited to the highest degree; a corresponding effect takes place upon the mind; a delirium of pleasure is produced, accompanied by the wildest flights of fancy; and the dread of punishment, the misery of the past, and the darkness of the future, are all forgotten in the mad enjoyment of the moment: even after the short gleam of happiness is past, and the sad reality of misery before them, so dear is its memory, that no extent of fear or punishment will induce them to betray the residence of the dealer. This state of excitement is shortly succeeded by a corresponding depression, the pulse becomes slow and feeble, accompanied by a pitiable languor and exhaustion of spirits; in this state they eagerly return to the cause of their suffering, and strive to drown the extent of their pain by increasing their daily quantum of the fatal drug. The rapid growth of the habit compels them to augment their dose to one or two or sometimes four drachms a day; an opium eater to such extent may be distinguished at the first glance from all others of his fellow men. He no longer seeks his paregoric as the means of pleasure but as a refuge from misery; the primary excitement is now little less terrible than the reaction; his fancy is clothed with frightful visions, spectres and phantoms accompany him in every movement, and knowing himself an object of scorn and loathing, he yet dreads to be alone; a frightful pallidness is spread over his face; every fibre of his frame trembles with irrecoverable palsy; he is devoured by hunger, which he has no means to satisfy, and by thirst which he dares not quench, for water would produce a spasm too violent for life; in this state the wretched victims of intemperance crowd round the doors of the merciless dealers, imploring the means of oblivion, and seeming like lost spirits sent back to warn their fellows from destruction. At length when hunger, thirst, and pain have done their worst, they sink into the grave, and enter a world where, if it were true that mere earthly suffering alone can atone for earthly sin, a state of unmixed happiness would be their lot.

For a connected statement of the facts as they occurred we refer our readers to the Oriental Herald for September, 1839.

ART. VII.-1. Tausend und eine Nacht. Arabische Erzählungen. zum Erstenmale aus den arabischen Urtext treu übersezt, von Dr. Gustav. Weil, Herausgegeben und mit einer Vorhalle, von August Lewald. mit 2000 Bildern und Vignetten, von F. Gross. Erster Band. Stuttgart. Pforzheim. 1838.

2. Kitab alif leelah wa leelahat. Edited by W. H. Macnaghten, Esq. Calcutta. 1839.

s. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, from the Arabic of the Egyptian MS., as edited by Wm. H. Macnaghten, Esq., B. C.S., done into English by Henry Torrens, B.C.S. B. A., and of the Inner Temple. Vol. 1. Calcutta and London.

1838.*

4. Essai sur Les Fables Indiennes et sur leur Introduction en Europe, par A. Loiseleur Deslongchamps. Paris. 1838.

THE singular fate of the interesting collection of tales which we now offer to the reader's consideration may afford an instance as well as a warning of the dangerous results likely to spring from too hasty and immediate a judgment upon novelties, formed, if we may so say, à priori, and upon the strange ground that they do not perfectly square with our received impressions and favourite prepossessions upon points more or less unknown. Invest as we will the arguments used by the learned of the most recent times and of our own, with all the pomp and circumstance of great names and widely varied acquisitions, still, in as much as our knowledge at the present day is so confessedly limited upon many portions of the past, the arguments we allude to come at best to no more than this, that because our ignorance precludes certainty it necessitates doubt, and that what we thus doubt we ought to deny, and what we deny we ought to discard.

This chain of reasoning, apparently so close, might and would be perfectly correct if only the basis were established :—if it was formed on our positive knowledge, and not on our confessedly imperfect information; but based, as it is, on the last alone, every step of the argument leads us but farther from the truth; for the truth, or the knowledge of truth, has yet to be discovered: and the proposition, therefore, is in all such cases only a string of utterly groundless assumptions.

The Thousand and One Nights, commonly called, in England, the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. A new translation from the Arabic, with copious notes. By Edward William Lane, author of "The Modern Egyptians." Illustrated by many hundred engravings on wood, from original designs by William Harvey in three volumes. Vol. I. London: Charles Knight and Co., Ludgate-street. 1839.

Acting upon it then as the learned have of late been too much accustomed to do, it is not to be wondered at that they have remained for so long a time comparatively stationary in their researches after the hidden things of antiquity; that they are as far as ever, in spite of their hieroglyphical labours, from lifting the veil of the Egyptian Isis in the West, or taking from the Parsee of the East that mystic covering which conceals or disguises the real utterance of his religious language. The mysteries of both systems, as of many others, doubtless involve a vast mass of fanciful and monstrous absurdity, but we are strongly tempted to believe that they also include and preserve enough of religious faith and historical fact to repay amply the labour of bringing the whole to light.

The scepticism which on a bolder, more erudite and elaborate, as well as a more recondite scale, has thrown aside the once vaunted and still really important discovery of volumes like the Zendavesta, the Dabistan, the Deshatoor, &c. and founded its objections upon names as referring, like the Akteristan, to stars and not to earth;-to languages as approximating to but not identical with any one with which we are at present acquainted;to sacred or prophetic personages unrecognizable by ourselves to this hour;-have certainly been ably sustained; and with a power of ingenuity and a range of learning in their champions that serves as a fair, though the only, excuse for admitting their validity. There are men whose mental powers and general attainments are of so gigantic a character and possess so preponderating an influence, that they have a right not only to be heard, but to be heard with an absolute prepossession in their favour. The world at large has neither the time, the information, the inclination, nor the ability to undertake a revision of their arguments or to dissent from their conclusions, and must be satisfied to walk with submissive faith in the creed of the more enlightened; to observe the path, and not trample on the flowers and fruits that have rewarded the care, labour, and science, of philosophical cultivators in so ungrateful a field.

But with all this due and indispensable reverence for authority, a time must come when it will be called in question, and by those even who were the foremost to bow before its dicta. When it is discovered that science, so far advanced, cannot proceed; that inquiry, however general, recoils upon itself; that the cup of knowledge, however inspiring, contains but dregs at the bottom, we are apt to feel a doubt whether purer matter does not still remain overlooked in the goblet; whether recoil is not produced by the insufficiency of the instrument; whether the further door of science is not barred by her own accumulations. Perhaps a few

magic sounds, a simple though strange incantation, or even the more vulgar labours of the spade, may clear away the rubbish that conceals the entrance of the mystic grot; and the Aladdeens and even the one-eyed Fakeers of Philology may penetrate to the scenes and sense of rites of abomination or load themselves with the boundless treasure of historic gems and pearls,-fitter offering for Princesses of China than the lethargic opiates of John Company and his crew.

If the scepticisms we refer to are more bold and more recondite, those of the case actually before us, as more general in their nature and affecting a point of popular feeling, are more likely to lead, and in fact have led, to the recoil which is just beginning to be felt by the public mind. When the "Thousand and One tales" were introduced to Europe by Galland they were at once pronounced ridiculous, improbable, unnatural; not mere exaggerations but absolute dreams of the distempered fancy of the East, presenting like other dreams, shapes of glory indeed, but, from monstrous combinations and impossible changes, mocking all powers of analysis and leaving only their vague and confused impressions on the pulse of manhood and in the light of day. Europe, still ignorant of the East to this hour, professed at that time to know it better than it was known to its own children. Two centuries have scarcely dissipated the illusion, then so rife, when the ingenious translator who had even adapted, in salutary dread, his labours to the taste of his native country and the Western world, was at once set down as an able impostor, ridiculed for his presumed ignorance, and persecuted with jesting malice. The truth of the scenes, however, and the nature and simplicity displayed in the characters, won their gradual way into the bosom of the multitude; and the child who had been lulled with visions of imaginary gorgeousness and facilities of unbounded power during sleep, remembered in his waking, and even his matured moments, the sympathies that had won his spirit and the facts that had interested his reason. A taste had been created, a feeling infused in his infancy, which grew with his growth and strengthened with the strength of subsequent gradual information; and though the world and its sterner realities called him away from these idle indulgences, mocked at its gentler phantasies, and precluded all relapse, still so closely were they associated with the hours and enjoyments of boyhood, that the father heard them referred to by his children with scarcely suppressed pleasure, and felt that, like the buried grain, their banishment to the nursery had given them root and produce a hundred fold.

In proportion to the increase of our Oriental intercourse the interest of the tales increased. They were found to convey a more

perfect picture of manners than the works of any traveller however accomplished and indefatigable, and to comprise in themselves a store of Eastern information, so illustrative of feelings and customs, and so well acclimated in general to the places they assumed to depict, that it was by no means easy to improve them in these respects. The internal evidence was too strong for scepticism, and even before the discovery of any MS. of the Thousand and One, the enlightened of every country had admitted their genuineness.

But now a new question arose; the very MSS. that established their authenticity as Eastern, awakened doubts by their discrepancies as to what country of the East could have originated them. Their manufacture, their immediate manufacture, was obviously that of the spot whence they were brought; but though the web had been woven in Arabia or Egypt, the threads were found also inwrought with the tissues of Hindostan, and the richest hues were undoubtedly Persian. Amongst a crowd of minor conjectures two parties were speedily formed, and the lists were graced by the two mightiest Champions of learned Europe, the Dii Majores of Historical language and Traditions. The acute ingenuity, profound research, enlarged learning, and scholastic accuracy of Silvester de Sacy traced, even to the minutest shades of correspondence and corroboration, the mode and manner of the Tales to their proper Arabian sources. The array of his facts, their causes, and coincidences, it was idle and impossible to deny; but it was possible to doubt the general conclusion, and the shield of this scepticism was in the hands of Von Hammer. With less of minuteness in details, or less perfect familiarity perhaps with language, less accuracy of general thought, and certainly less intimacy with Arabia than his justly-renowned and thus far unrivalled antagonist, the Orientalist of Vienna possessed an even wider range of languages, a freer survey of tradition, and, singly worth all other qualifications, a bolder spirit of thought. Bound by the ties of assumed descent for his nation from the tribes of the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea, Von Hammer has ever loved with filial reverence to trace the seats, the rites, the destinies, and the claims of his Indo-German ancestors. If such investigations have, as asserted, sometimes led him into errors, these were venial and trifling; more trifling we venture to affirm than most of those embraced by the general opponents of his lucubrations, and, so far as we ourselves have been able to examine, much of his apparently wilder speculations have been strengthened, if not absolutely established, by the arguments of his adversaries; amongst such we would particularly specify Simkowsky. We may be pardoned for digressing so far as to

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