The power of listening to long stories (for which, by-the-bye, I am
giving you large credit) is common, I fancy, to most sailors, and
the Greeks have it to a high degree, for they can be perfectly
patient under a narrative of two or three hours' duration. These
long stories are mostly founded upon Oriental topics, and in one of
them I recognised with some alteration an old friend of the
"Arabian Nights." I inquired as to the source from which the story
had been derived, and the crew all agreed that it had been handed
down unwritten from Greek to Greek. Their account of the matter
does not, perhaps, go very far towards showing the real origin of
the tale; but when I afterwards took up the "Arabian Nights," I
became strongly impressed with a notion that they must have sprung
from the brain of a Greek. It seems to me that these stories,
whilst they disclose a complete and habitual KNOWLEDGE of things
Asiatic, have about them so much of freshness and life, so much of
the stirring and volatile European character, that they cannot have
owed their conception to a mere Oriental, who for creative purposes
is a thing dead and dry--a mental mummy, that may have been a live
king just after the Flood, but has since lain balmed in spice.
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