There is ārNāyet another work usually considered as belonging to the _Sindibād_ class of romances, namely, the Turkish Tales of the _Forty Viziers_, which is said to have been composed, during the reign of Sultān Murād II, in 1421, after an Arabian romance entitled “Tales of the Forty Mornings and Forty Evenings,” composed by Shaikh Zāda. But the author of this work, as M. Deslongchamps has justly remarked, has borrowed little from the _Book of Sindibād_ besides the frame. The tales—which are eighty in number, forty of which are told by the Viziers, and forty by the Queen—are quite different from, yet no whit inferior to, those of any version of the King and his Seven Counsellors. M. Petit de Lacroix, last century, made a French translation of this work as far as the story of the Tenth Vizier, which was soon afterwards rendered into English, but divested of much of the Oriental costume and colour. In 1851 Behrnauer issued a German rendering of the Turkish text. And it may interest some readers to know that Mr E. J. W. Gibb—whose recently published translations of Ottoman Poems, with Introduction, Biographical Notices, and Notes, have received the approbation of competent judges—is at present engaged on a complete English translation of this highly entertaining romance.
Having in the preceding section glanced at the various works of fiction in different languages which have been derived or imitated from the _Book of Sindibād_, let us now proceed to examine the degree of relationship which the _Bakhtyār Nāma_ bears to the same work. The learned writer of an able and interesting analysis, in the _Asiatic Journal_, vol. xxx, 1839, of two different manuscripts of the _Thousand and One Nights_, preserved in the British Museum, has fallen into a singular mistake when he says: “It is curious enough that in each of the two MSS. a tale is interpolated on the plan of the _Bakhtyār Nāma_. A King wishes to destroy his son, and his Viziers relate stories to prove the malice of women, alternately with the King’s concubine, who has falsely accused the young man, and who tells stories of the subtlety of men.” This is the frame of the _Sindibād Nāma_, not that of the _Bakhtyār Nāma_, since in the former the Viziers are the defenders of the innocent, and relate stories on his behalf; while the case is precisely reversed in the _Bakhytār Nāma_, where the Viziers are the accusers, eager for the death of the innocent young man, and it is the accused youth himself who relates the stories. The only resemblance which the Romance of Prince Bakhtyār bears to the leading story of the _Book of Sindibād_ (and its offspring) is the incident of a youth being falsely accused of attempting to violate the Queen, as will be seen from the following outline of the Bakhtyār Story.