The poet Robert Browning left a large corpus, including his translation of Goethe’s masterful West-östlicher Diwan. One of his longer poems is an Oriental tale entitled Ferishtah’s Fancies. Recently in a used book shop I bought a copy of the 1885 edition published in Boston by Houghton, Mifflin and Company. There is an ironic epigraph for this Orientalist tale from Shakespeare’s King Lear (Act III, Scene 6) at the forefront:

You, Sir, I entertain you for one of my Hundred; only I do not like the fashion of your garments: you will say, they are Persian; but let them be changed.”

Browning’s verse is as antiquated today as the tale he spun, but still worth looking at if only for the nostalgia of Victorian English prose. Here is an excerpt from the encounter of Dervish Ferishtah with a former high official now beggared:

The Mellon-seller

Going his rounds one day in Ispahan, –
Half way on Dervishhood, not wholly there, –
Ferishtah, as he crossed a certain bridge,
Came startled on a well-remembered face.
“Can it be? What, turned melon-seller – thou?
Clad in such sordid garb, thy seat yon step
Where dogs brush by thee and express contempt?
Methinks, thy head-gear is some scooped-out gourd!
Nay, sunk to slicing up, for readier sale,
One fruit whereof the whole scarce feeds a swine?
Was thou the Shah’s Prime Minister, men saw
Ride on his right-hand while a trumpet blew
And Persia hailed the Favorite? Yea, twelve years
Are past, I judge, since that transcendency,
And thou didst peculate and art debased;
No less, twelve years since, thou didst hold in hand
Persia, couldst halve and quarter, mince its pulp
As pleased thee, and distribute – melon-like –
Portions to whoso played the parasite,
Or suck – thyself – each juicy morsel. How
enormous thy abjection – hell from heaven,
Made tenfold hell by contrast! Whisper me!
Dost thou curse God for granting twelve year’s bliss
Only to prove this day’s the dirtier lot?

Whereupon the beggar raised a brow, once more
Luminous and imperial, from the rags,
“Fool, does thy folly think my foolishness
Dwells rather on the tact that God appoints
A day of woe to the unworthy one,
Than that the unworthy one, by God’s award,
Tasted joy twelve years long? Or buy a slice,
Or got to school!”
……………………. to school Ferishtah went..