ONE OF THE PIECES particularly admired by initial readers of Matthew Arnold’s first volumes of poetry was ‘The Sick King in Bokhara’ (1849). ‘[M]ost pleasing to the ordinary mind’, said The Times on 4 November 1853; 1 ‘one of the wisest, most simple, and most genial of the poems’, 2 added Fraser’s Magazine the following year. The story on which the poem—probably written in 1847 or 1848? 3—is based is told in Alexander Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara (1834). 4 It concerns the King of Bokhara who tries, generously, to overturn the death penalty handed down to a strict Muslim who had in some way violated the law. But the guilty man...