APPENDIX 639

besides, from St. David’s, Reigate, the loan of an equally beautiful drawing by Rossetti, in another kind, “Golden Water,”-which had also been mine once, but which I gave away, long ago, thinking it would be more useful elsewhere than at Denmark Hill.

But neither the Passover, nor Golden Water, nor any of Rossetti’s nobler drawings, have ever yet, so far as I know, been useful anywhere; their designs being founded on close reading of legends, whether Persian or Christian, which the modern picture-student never reads, and has not the means of understanding, when he gets extracts from them.

I did not see the description of these drawings in the East End catalogue; and may therefore, perhaps, be repeating now what has already been told, of the story of “Golden Water.” But as it is a quite favourite story with me, and has had an immense power over my own life, it is perhaps well that I tell it without reference to any previous form in which it may have appeared. It is only the close of a longer one, the last in the French translation of the Arabian Nights;¹ and I must say in the outset that this simple French translation is the only good one existing for the modern reader. Mr. Lane’s, while it presents the Arabian shell or casket of the stories in perfection, has dropped out the kernels of them, and the jewels; the living germ and contents of each tale, by which it had become, long ago, a part of the world’s legend-book, and a proverb in its education. This particular story, which for general instruction is quite the most precious in the old series,-either because it is not Arabian enough, or not Aryan enough, or not modern Republican enough, is omitted by Mr. Lane altogether.

It begins gloomily. A great sultan marries the youngest of three sisters. Her elder sisters, at heart jealous of her to the death, obtain leave from the sultan to attend her in child-birth. She bears in succession two princes and a princess; all as beautiful as the day. But her sisters, at each of the births, conceal the child, and tell the sultan that his sultana has been delivered of a deformed or senseless brood. At the third asserted miscarriage, he orders her death; and devotes himself, in perpetual mourning, to the interests only of his kingdom. A faithful vizier, however, though unable to expose the sisters’ treachery, saves the sultana, and keeps her in seclusion, as Hermione in Winter’s Tale; while the three children are brought up, by his orders, in a palace of their own, in a retired province; and there taught every princely learning and exercise. When they reach the prime of youth,-the Princess Parizade, perhaps, about sixteen, her brothers a year and couple of years older,-they are accomplished and beautiful and good, beyond all telling; and their palace is a miracle of household grace, brightness, and order.

One day, when her brothers are out hunting, an old woman asks hospitality from the princess; which being granted, she farther asks leave to see the palace. She is shown all the chambers, and all the treasures of it,-her hostess requiring afterwards that she present herself to say what she thinks of all she has seen. The old woman is courteous in

¹ [“Les Deux Sœurs jalouses de leur Cadette,” in vol. vi. pp. 298 seq. of Les Mille et une Nuits, traduits en Francois par M. Galland (Paris, ed. 1745). The story is at vol. v. pp. 342 seq. of Jonathan Scott’s English translation (1811).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]