For several centuries previous to the publication of the first professed translation of a work of Eastern fiction into a European language,ārNā there existed two celebrated collections of Tales, written in Latin, mainly derived from Oriental sources, to which may be traced many of the popular fictions of Europe; these are, the _Clericali Disciplina_ of Peter Alfonsus, a Spanish Jew, who was baptized in the twelfth century; and the _Gesta Romanorum_, the authorship of which is doubtful, but it is believed to have been composed in the 14th century. The latter work greatly influenced the compositions of the early Italian Novelists, and its effect on English Poetry is at least equally marked. It furnished to Gower and Chaucer their history of _Constance_; to Shakspeare his _King Lear_, and his _Merchant of Venice_, which is an Eastern story; to Parnell the subject of his _Hermit_—primarily a Talmudic legend, afterwards adopted in the Kur’ān. The _Clericali Disciplina_, professedly a compilation from Eastern sources, contains a number of stories of undoubted Indian origin, which Alfonsus must have obtained through an Arabian medium in Spain, however they may have come thither. These fictions of Oriental birth were, of course, filtered through the clerical mind of mediæval Europe, and in the process they lost all their native flavour. But on the publication of Galland’s _Les Mille et Une Nuits_, the Thousand and One Nights, in the beginning of last century, garbled and Frenchified as was his translation, the richness of the Eastern fancy, as exhibited in these pleasing fictions, was at once recognised, and, as the learned Baron de Sacy has remarked, in the course of a few years this work filled Europe with its fame. And its success has continued to increase, so that there is perhaps no work of fiction, whether native or exotic, which is at the present day so universally popular throughout Europe: it is at once the delight of the school-boy and the recreation of the sage. Shortly after its appearance in a French dress, Addison introduced it to English readers in the _Spectator_, where he presented a translation—or adaptation—of the now famous story of Alnaschar (according to Galland’s French transliteration of the name) and his basket of brittle wares: a story which is not only calculated to please the “rising generation,” but may also instruct “children of larger growth.”