The Sun.
London, England, 1865-11-29 00:00:00

WAYS.
Cash.

NG, NOVEMBER 29, IS(S.

LITERATURE.

New Arabian Stories.

Mehemet, the Kurd, and Other Tales, from Eastern
Sources. By Charles Wells. One Vol., pp. 184.
Bell and Daldy.
Eureka !—it is found (that desired of kings) a
new sensation ! A collection of perfectly fresh and
original tales—fresh and original, that is, so far as
English readers are concerned—one, at least, among
which tales, the first and longest story of them all, is

worthy of taking its place and of holding its own
among the thousand and one tales of the Arabian
Nights' Entertainments ! Mehemet, the Kurd, is
the name of this exquisite Arabian Romance,
hitherto wholly unknown in the English language.
How it has so happened that never until now has

it been translated from the Arabic into our own

tongue simply passes our comprehension. At any

rate it is translated at last—thanks to a learned

and gifted Member of the Asiatic Society, the au-

thor of this charming volume in fact, Mr. Charles
Wells, already honourably known among English

cultivators of oriental literature as Turkish Prize-

man of King's College. Having, for our own part,
read "Mehemet, the Kurd," from beginning to end
—and whosoever, following our example, shall begin
with the beginning, we promise here, will infallibly,
like ourselves, end only with the end !—we
are Mr. Charles Wells' most obedient ! As

surely as ever the Wedding Guest was the

Ancient Mariner's most obedient in the weird and

wondrous ballad of Coleridge ! For, reading this
story of Mehemet the Kurd we are fairly wafted
away into the regions of Fairyland, or, at least,
into the realms peopled with such marvellous

creatures as the Genii, the Gnome, the Cyclops, the
Troll, the Wizard, and the Mannikin. We seem
to breath a very atmosphere of black magic and
diablerie. Our feet are virtually shod, like Jack's,
with the shoes of swiftness. Clanking at our side,

ready to hand in its scabbard, hangs Jack's sword
of sharpness. On our head is the cap, in our
pocket is the purse of Fortunatus. Encircling our
finger glitters the ring, held in our grasp shines
the lamp' of Aladdin. We sail through the air
cross-legged, either between the outstretched wings
of a roc or upon a square yard of the immemorial
wishing carpet. All this—while we are reading the
marvellous history of Mehemet, the Kurd, as it is
here related to us in an evidently most faithful
translation by Mr. Wells, an oriental scholar, so
ripe and truthful in his scholarship that he adheres
faithfully throughout to the very manner of the
original. Besides the story of Mehemet, the
Kurd, there are eight other (most of them
very brief) oriental narratives, such as " The
Tale of a Skull," "The Wife with Two Hus-
bands," " The Princess and the Cobbler," and

so forth, together with eleven ♦ery curious
specimens of Oriental Poetry, such as " The Butter-
fly and the Candle," or such again as " The Rose
and the Nightingale." But—ingenious and some-
times really beautiful though these new exemplars of
the imaginativeness of the oriental race undoubtedly
are—the pride of the book, the glory and wonder
of it, to our thinking, is the first story of
all, the story about Mehemet. The fascina-
tion of this particular story, as a narrative,
begins with the decline of the fortunes of the
young Kurd, when, after squandering his wealth of
all kinds, whether in horses, camels, cattle, tents,
or raiment, he finds his friends dropping away
from him one by one—leaving him at last in the
desert with no shelter to his head, in the shape of an
inch of tent canvass, with scarcely a rag to cover
his nakedness, and he himself half dead from
drought and starvation. The darkest hour before
the dawn, says the proverb—and so it proves, in
truth, to be with regard to Mehemet. Presented
with five sheep by an old man who had known his
father and who pities the son's misfortunes in the
light of that remembrance—Mehemet is driving his
five sheep wearily through the desert in search 'of
better fortune, when he encounters a knave of a
courier or letter - carrier (as he turns out
to be afterwards), to whom Mehemet, in his sim-
plicity, .sells his five sheep—for what ? For
a dream ! " Yesterday," quoth the man, in answer
to Mehemet's inquiries as to whither he was going,
—" Yesterday, know that I had a dream, and now
I am going to catch it before any one can take it
before me." So said Mehemet to the man, " Will
you not sell me your dream ?" " Yes, with great
pleasure," answered the man; and—as Mehemet
wished to get rid of the sheep (being weary of them),
and as the man (in his cunning) wished to get
possession of them—they, that is Mehemet and the
man, are not long in coming to an agree-
ment. The man—laughing in his sleeve or
under the shadow of his burnous rather—marches
off with the five sheep triumphantly. Mehemet,
hastening on in the direction pointed out to him,
goes eagerly in quest of the dream he is bent upon
catching ! The marvel of the whole sequel of the
story being this, that in point of fact a dream,
such as Kurd had never dreamt before, is actually
caught by Mehemet, and realized by him magni-
ficently ! From the City of the Four Towers
he bears off thebeautiful Princess Durat-el-Muluk,
carrying her far away, from the dominions of
King Hassan (her father) to those of King
Gulnar ! How, having changed his rags for
princely robes, and taken to wife the
lovely young Princess Durat-el-Muluk, Mehe-
met obtains, with his first wife's consent,
a second wife, in the still lovelier form of the Prin-
cess Bahr-el-Maha, and afterwards, with the con-
sent of both first and second wife, of yet a third,
the loveliest of all three, in the Tersbn of the Prin-
cess Nuzat-ez-Zeman ! How he first engratiates
himself with King Gulnar, by presenting him a
golden dish filled with precious stones, representing
himself to be the son of King Fidous, a far -away
monarch of formidable power ! How he builds up a
noble city in place of a ruined village and, in the
midst of it, raises the walls of a sumptuous palace,
in which he lives in great splendour, peace, and
popularity with his three wives, the Princesses
Durat-el-Muluk, Bahr-el-Maha, and Nuzhat-ez-
Zeman ! How he wins the one of them by a mid-
night flight on horseback—the second by ravishing
the sword made of seven metals from among the
Treasures of the Wise—and the third, by plucking
ten apples in the Garden of the Philosophers ! How
one and another in this story sail about in mid-air in
a golden balloon ! How we make the acquaintance of
the Magician Zirajjan, of King Hassan, and even-
tually of King Fidous, and how all ends happily
for—no longer Mehemet, the Kurd, but—Mehemet,
the King ! Let the translator of this gorgeous
romance from the far east relate himself in his own
truthful and eloquent translation of the tale as
it is told in the Arabic original ! For, mar the
effect of it we will not by any cold-blooded and
deliberate epitome of the chain of incidents.
Altogether it is an exquisite and fascinating tale,
according to our appreciation of it—a tale so truly
Oriental in its character, and so magnificent in its
imaginings, that we unhesitatingly place it upon the
same shelf with the Zadig of Voltaire, and the
Vathek of Beckford, and best of all, beyond all,
that world's wilderness of mirages of the imagina-
tion, the Arabian Nights' Entertainments them-
selves

EARL RUSSELL AND THE BRADFORD REFORM
MEETING.—The deputation from the Bradford Re
form meeting, consisting of the following gentlemen--
Messrs. H. W. Wickham, M.P., W. E. Forster, M.P.,
Alderman Brown, Robert Kell, and W. H. Arnold—waited
upon Earl Russell in Downing-street yesterday afternoon.
His lordship expressed generally his concurrence with most
of the views of the memorialists as to the admission of the
working classes to such a share in the representation as
their intelligence and interests require, and stated that he
was himself of opinion that the time had home for a further
admission of the working classes to a share in the repre-
sentation, but that, considering the great opposition any
bill might meet with, the Government would not think it
wise to bring forward .a bill unless it was fully matured and
grounded upon well-ascertained facts.
TIE MYSTERIOUS DEATH AT CAMBERIVET.L.--An
inquest was held yesterday by Mr. Carter on the
body of Walter Isaac Acklin, the man who was found
dead with his head fixed between the palings of a piece of
asto ground in Brunswick-square, Camberwell, under
the circumstances reported on Monday. It seemed per-
fectly clear from the evidence that no foul play had been
practised towards the deceased, who probably was sud-
denly taken ill and fell while leaning towards the palings,
and his hands being in his pockets was unablo to extri-
cate himself. The jury returned a verdict of "Accidental
death."