This fronts like it's gonna be a golden mean tale about the temperament of the prince and the ship of state, and the conceit of busting said prince into two inverse-image brothers is kind of cute (and setting it in Persia for no reason other than then genies ("Geniuses") can do all the plot stuff with their magic and also Persia was big was kinda pointless, but better than cruel-despotate orientalism). But then everyone's gotta give their little speeches that end with a lesson, and it turns out to be less about the state and more about bodyswitching and a weird love triangle that could have gone on just the same way with genies if nobody was a king at all, and it's kind of fun at the end to try to keep track of who said what to whom wearing whose face and what that means for what who said to whom wearing whose other face, but that's not the fun of literature, per se, more the fun of a good Diplomacy game or such. I understand Hawkesworth is best known for being a hanger-on of Sam Johnson who somehow got the contract from the Admiralty to edit Captain Cook's diaries and got a big advance and everyone was jealous but then did such a shit job (redacting all the parts he thought were boring, applying a weird consistency of tone over Cook's diaries and those of his botanist Banks like one guy did them both, adding great swathes of his own stuff (including Adventures! Fake-news ones!), and picking an extended, technical, and tedious theological argument with Cook in the introduction about whether God would want them to name a channel "The Providential Channel," and then everyone hated him, and I read this book and I think yeah, that's this guy, this is a book written by a guy who thinks he's way better than he is. ( )

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L'abbé Prévost est le premier traducteur de cet ouvrage-ci, dont l'original est en anglais. Le véritable auteur est M. Hankesworth. L'ouvrage, qui a été imprimé à i.on .iv en 1761, 2 volumes in-12, passe pour être bien écrit en anglais. Il y a de la morale et du sentiment, mais le costume oriental n'y est pas toujours parfaitement observé. L'auteur vivait encore en 1704. 11 était auteur d'un bon journal intitulé l'Aventurier, dont on trouve des extraits dans le Journal étranger. Il a aussi composé deux ou trois pièces de théâtre. On trouve l'extrait de ce roman dans le Journal encyclopédique, de septembre 1761. » D. P