cordingly.

[11] This is also one of the Fables of Marie de France (thirteenth
century).

[12] A complete translation of the _Katha Sarit Sagara_, by
Professor C.H. Tawney, with notes of variants, which exhibit his wide
acquaintance with the popular fictions of all lands, has been recently
published at Calcutta (London agents, Messrs. Truebner and Co.), a work
which must prove invaluable to every English student of comparative
folk-lore.

[13] Siva's paradise, according to Hindu mythology, is on Mount Kailasa,
in the Himalyas, north of Manasa.

[14] Tawney's translation, which is used throughout this work.

CHAPTER III.

GOTHAMITE DROLLERIES (_continued_).

The Schildburgers, it has been already remarked, are the Gothamites of
Germany, and the stories of their stupidity, after being orally current
for years among the people, were collected near the close of the
sixteenth century, the earliest known edition being that of 1597. In a
most lively and entertaining article on "Early German Comic Romances"
(_Foreign Quarterly Review_, No. 40, 1837), the late Mr. W.J. Thoms
has furnished an account of the exploits of the Schildburgers, from
which the following particulars and tales are extracted: "There have
been few happier ideas than that of making these simpletons descend from
one of the wise men of Greece, and representing them as originally
gifted with such extraordinary talents as to be called to the councils
of all the princes of the earth, to the great detriment of their
circumstances and the still greater dissatisfaction of their wives, and
then, upon their being summoned home to arrange their disordered
affairs, determining, in their wisdom, to put on the garb of stupidity,
and persevering so long and so steadfastly in their assumed character as
to prove 'plain fools at last.' No way inferior is the end of this
strange tale, which assumes even somewhat of serious interest when the
Schildburgers, after performing every conceivable piece of folly, and
receiving the especial privilege of so doing under the seal and
signature of the emperor, by the crowning act of their lives turn
themselves out of house and home, whereby they are compelled, like the
Jews, to become outcasts and wanderers over the face of the earth, by
which means it has arisen that there is no spot, however remote, on
which some of their descendants, who may be known by their
characteristic stupidity, are not to be found."

Their first p