ave
revised the work of Petis de La Croix in the _Days_; and some of his own
certainly corresponds to it.

[235] Or, as it was once put, with easy epigram, when the artificial
fairy tale is not dreadfully improper it is apt to be dreadfully proper.

[236] Nothing suits the entire group better than the reply of the
ferocious and sleepless but not unintelligent Sultan Hudgiadge, in the
_Nouveaux Contes Orientaux_, when his little benefactress Moradbak says
that she will have the honour to-morrow of telling him a _histoire
Mongole_. "Le pays n'y fait rien," says he. And it doesn't.

[237] All of them, be it remembered, the work of Gueulette (_v. inf._).

[238] The recently recovered "episodes" of this are rather more like the
_Cabinet_ stories than _Vathek_ itself; and perhaps a sense of this may
have been part of the reason why Beckford never published them.

[239] He came to ask, or rather demand, Zibeline's hand for his master:
and the fairy made his magnificence appear rags and rubbish.

[240] Mr. Toots's "I'm a-a-fraid you must have got very wet." When
Courtebotte returns from his expedition, across six months of snow, to
the Ice Mountain on the top of which rests Zibeline's heart, "many
thousand persons" ask him, "_Vous avez donc eu bien froid?_"

[241] She is also said to have been a "love-child" of no less a father
than Prince Eugene.

[242] Anybody who is curious as to this should look up the matter, as
may be done most conveniently in an _excursus_ of Napier's edition,
where my "friend of" [more than] "forty years," the late Mr. Mowbray
Morris, in a note to his own admirable one-volume "Globe" issue, thought
that Macaulay was "proved to be absolutely right." Morris, though his
published and signed writings were few, and though he pushed to its very
furthest the hatred of personal advertisement natural to most English
"_gentlemen_ of the press," was a man of the world and of letters in
most unusual combination; of a true Augustan taste both in criticism and
in composition; of wit and of _savoir vivre_ such as few possess. But,
like all men who are good for anything, he had some crazes: and one of
them was Macaulay. I own that I do not think all the honours were on T.
B. M.'s side in this mellay: but this is not the place to reason out the
matter. What is quite certain is that in this long-winded and mostly
trivial performance there is a great deal of intended, or at least
suggested, political satire. But J