A Boswell of Baghdad

A Boswell of Baghdad, by E. V. Lucas

The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Boswell of Baghdad, by E. V. Lucas This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: A Boswell of Baghdad With Diversions
Author: E. V. Lucas
Release Date: December 10, 2006 [EBook #20083]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A BOSWELL OF BAGHDAD ***

Produced by Audrey Longhurst and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

A BOSWELL OF BAGHDAD

OTHER WORKS BY E. V. LUCAS
The Vermilion Box Landmarks Listener's Lure Mr. Ingleside Over Bemerton's London Lavender Cloud and Silver Loiterer's Harvest One Day and Another Fireside and Sunshine Character and Comedy Old Lamps for New The Hambledon Men The Open Road The Friendly Town Her Infinite Variety Good Company The Gentlest Art The Second Post A Little of Everything Harvest Home Variety Lane The Best of Lamb The Life of Charles Lamb A Swan and Her Friends London Revisited A Wanderer in Venice A Wanderer in Paris A Wanderer in London A Wanderer in Holland A Wanderer in Florence The British School Highways and Byways in Sussex Anne's Terrible Good Nature The Slowcoach Remember Louvain! Swollen-Headed William
and
The Pocket Edition of the Works of Charles Lamb: I. Miscellaneous Prose; II. Elia; III. Children's Books; IV. Poems and Plays; V. and VI. Letters.

A BOSWELL OF BAGHDAD
WITH DIVERSIONS
BY
E. V. LUCAS
THIRD EDITION
METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON
This Book was First Published September 20th 1917
Second Edition December 1917
Third Edition 1918

CONTENTS
PAGE
A BOSWELL OF BAGHDAD 1
DIVERSIONS--
NURSES 93
NO. 344260 99
THE TWO PERKINSES 106
ARTS OF INVASION 118
THE MARBLE ARCH AND PETER MAGNUS 128
THE OLDEST JOKE 133
THE PUTTENHAMS 140
POETRY MADE EASY 148
A PIONEER 153
FULL CIRCLE 158
A FRIEND OF MAN 164
THE LISTENER 171
THE DARK SECRET 176
THE SCHOLAR AND THE PIRATE 180
A SET OF THREE 191
A LESSON 196
ON BELLONA'S HEM (SECOND SERIES)--
A REVEL IN GAMBOGIA 201
THE MISFIRE 207
A LETTER 212
A MANOR IN THE AIR 219
RIVALRY 223
A FIRST COMMUNION IN THE WAR ZONE 229
THE ACE OF DIAMONDS 234
THE REWARD OF OUR BROTHER THE POILU 239
NOTE 245

=A BOSWELL OF BAGHDAD=

A BOSWELL OF BAGHDAD
I.--INTRODUCTORY
A curious and very entertaining work lies before me, or, to be more accurate, ramparts me, for it is in four ponderous volumes, capable, each, even in less powerful hands than those of the Great Lexicographer, of felling a bookseller. At these volumes I have been sipping, beelike, at odd times for some years, and I now propose to yield some of the honey--the season having become timely, since the great majority of the heroes of its thousands of pages hail from Baghdad; and Baghdad, after all its wonderful and intact Oriental past, is to-day under Britain's thumb.
The title of the book is Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary, translated from the Arabic by Bn Mac Guckin de Slane, and printed in Paris for the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1842-71, some centuries after it was written, for its author was dead before Edward II ascended the English throne. Who would expect Sir Sidney Lee to have had so remote an exemplar?
Remote not only in time but in distance. For although we may go to the East for religions and systems of philosophy that were old and proved worthy centuries before Hellenism or Christianity, yet we do not usually find there models for our works of reference. Hardly does Rome give us those. But there is an orderliness and thoroughness about Ibn Khallikan's methods which the Dictionary of National Biography does not exceed. The Persian may be more lenient to floridity ("No flowers, by request," was, it will be remembered, the first English editor's motto), but in his desire to leave out no one who ought to be in and to do justice to his inclusions he is beyond praise.
The modernity of the ancients is continually surprising us. It is one of the phenomena to which we are never quite inured (and could we be so we should perhaps merely substitute the antiquity of the moderns as a new source of wonder), but towards such inuring Ibn Khallikan should certainly help, since he was eminently a gossip, and in order to get human nature's fidelity to the type--no matter where found, whether ?ons ago or to-day, whether in savage lands or, as we say, civilized--brought home to us, it is to the gossips that we must resort: to the Pepyses and Boswells rather than to the Goethes and Platos; to the little recorders rather than the great thinkers. The small traits tell.
Ibn Khallikan's Dictionary is as interesting as it is, not because its author had any remarkable instinct as a biographer, or any gift of selection, but because if a