“Les fables, loin de grandir les hommes, la Nature et Dieu, rapetssent tout.” Lamartine (Milton) “One who had eyes saw it; the blind will not understand it. A poet, who is a boy, he has perceived it; he who understands it will be his sire’s sire.”—Rig-Veda (I.164.16).
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE FIRST (1870) EDITION.
THE VAMPIRE’S FIRST STORY — In which a man deceives a woman.
THE VAMPIRE’S SECOND STORY — Of the Relative Villany of Men and Women.
THE VAMPIRE’S THIRD STORY — Of a High-minded Family.
THE VAMPIRE’S FOURTH STORY — Of A Woman Who Told The Truth.
THE VAMPIRE’S FIFTH STORY — Of the Thief Who Laughed and Wept.
THE VAMPIRE’S SIXTH STORY — In Which Three Men Dispute about a Woman.
THE VAMPIRE’S SEVENTH STORY — Showing the Exceeding Folly of Many Wise Fools.
THE VAMPIRE’S EIGHTH STORY — Of the Use and Misuse of Magic Pills.
THE VAMPIRE’S NINTH STORY — Showing That a Man’s Wife Belongs Not to His Body but to His Head.
THE VAMPIRE’S TENTH STORY [168] — Of the Marvellous Delicacy of Three Queens.
THE VAMPIRE’S ELEVENTH STORY — Which Puzzles Raja Vikram.
The Baital-Pachisi, or Twenty-five Tales of a Baital is the history of a huge Bat, Vampire, or Evil Spirit which inhabited and animated dead bodies. It is an old, and thoroughly Hindu, Legend composed in Sanskrit, and is the germ which culminated in the Arabian Nights, and which inspired the “Golden Ass” of Apuleius, Boccacio’s “Decamerone,” the “Pentamerone,” and all that class of facetious fictitious literature.
The story turns chiefly on a great king named Vikram, the King Arthur of the East, who in pursuance of his promise to a Jogi or Magician, brings to him the Baital (Vampire), who is hanging on a tree. The difficulties King Vikram and his son have in bringing the Vampire into the presence of the Jogi are truly laughable; and on this thread is strung a series of Hindu fairy stories, which contain much interes