Barmacide Feast, an imaginary feast, so called from a story in the “Arabian Nights” of a hungry beggar invited by a Barmacide prince to a banquet, which proved a long succession of merely empty dishes, and which he enjoyed with such seeming gusto and such good-humour as to earn for himself a sumptuous real one.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Barlowe * Bar`macides