631st night with the well-known Story of King Bekhtzad
(Azadbekht) and his son or the Ten Viziers, (which will be found
translated in my " Tales from the Arabic," Vol. I. pp. 61 et
seq.) and contains, immediately after Night CCCCXXVII and before
the story of Ganem, a note in Arabic, of which the following is a
translation:

"The fourth volume of the wonders and marvels of the stories of
the Thousand Nights and One Night was finished by the hand of the
humblest of His' servants in the habit of a minister of religion
(Kahin, lit. a diviner, Cohen), the [Christian] priest Dionysius
Shawish, a scion (selil) of the College of the Romans (Greeks,
Europeans or Franks, er Roum), by name St. Athanasius, in Rome
the Greatest (or Greater, utsma, fem. of aatsem, qu re
Constantinople ?) on the seven-and-twentieth of the month Shubat
(February) of the year one thousand seven hundred fourscore and
seven, [he being] then teacher of the Arabic tongue in the
Library of the Sultan, King of France, at Paris the Greatest."

From this somewhat incoherent note we may assume that the MS. was
written in the course of the year 1787 by the notorious Syrian
ecclesiastic Dom Denis Chavis, the accomplice of Cazotte in the
extraordinary literary atrocity shortly afterward perpetrated by
the latter under the name of a sequel or continuation of the
Thousand and One Nights [FN#6] (v. Cabinet des Fees, vols.
xxxviii--xli), [FN#7] and in all probability (cf. the mention in
the above note of the first part, i.e. Nights CCLXXXI-CCCCXXVII,
as the fourth volume) to supply the place of Galland's missing
fourth volume for the Bibliotheque Royale; but there. is nothing,
except a general similarity of style and the occurrence in the