Volume 6 — OPINIONS OF THE PRESS

457

Morning Advertiser, September 15th, 1885.

As the holiday season draws to a close the publishers’ announcements of “new books” fill column after column of the organs chosen from these special communiqués, But there is one work which is not entered in these lists, though for years scholars, and many people who are not scholars, have been looking for it with an eagerness which has left far behind the ordinary curiosity which is bestowed on the greatest of contributions to current literature. And to-day the chosen few who are in possession of the volume in question are examining it with an interest proportionate to the long toil which has been bestowed on its preparation. We refer to Captain Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights Entertainments, now entitled The Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night, of which the first tome has just been issued. * * * * Captain Burton scorns any namby-pambyism. In the Arabic a spade is usually called a spade, and in the latest English translation it is never designated an agricultural implement. Moreover the endless foot-notes which the editor appends speak with much freedom of many things usually avoided as themes for conversation in polite society, though they throw a flood of light on hundreds of features of Oriental life on which, since travellers have been compelled to write for “refined” audiences, the student has failed to be informed. * * * * * * Yet, admitting that The Nights are often coarse and indelicate, and sometimes even gross, it is a mistake to suppose that they are demoralising in the same way that a French novel of the Zola type is, or might be. Indeed, what we would call its impropriety is only a reflection of the naïve freedom with which talk is to this day carried on in the family circles of the East. They see no harm in what we should regard as indecency. So that when Captain Burton prefaces his unbowdlerised version with the Arab proverb, “To the pure in heart all things are pure,” he presents perhaps the best defence he could against the attack which it is quite possible may be made on him for devoting many years of his life to what he terms a “a labour of love.” * * * Captain Burton, thirty-three years ago, went in the disguise of an Indian pilgrim to Mecca and Al-Medinah, and no one capable of giving the world the result of his experience has so minute, so exhaustive a knowledge of Arab and Oriental life generally. Hence the work now begun—only a limited number of students can ever see—is simply priceless to any one who concerns himself with such subjects, and may be regarded as marking an era in the annals of Oriental translation.

St. James’ Gazette, September 12th, 1885.

One of the most important translations to which a great English scholar has ever devoted himself is now in the press. For three decades Captain Burton has been more or less engaged on his translation of the Arabian Nights, the latest of the many versions of that extraordinary story which has been made into English, the only one at all worthy of a great original.

458

Whitehall Review, September 17th, 1885.

The publication of the first volume of Captain Burton’s translation of the Alif Laïla, enriches the world of Oriental investigation with a monument of labour and scholarship and of research. The book is advisedly, and even inevitably, printed for private circulation, and is intended, as Captain Burton says in his preface, only for the eyes of such persons as are seriously students of Oriental life and manners, and are desirous of making a more complete acquaintance with the great masterpieces of Eastern literature than has hitherto been possible, except to finished Arabic scholars. * * * * * In the name of the whole world of Oriental scholarship, we offer our heartfelt thanks and congratulations to Captain Burton upon the appearance of this first volume: and we look forward with the keenest interest for its successors.

Home News, September 18th, 1885.

Captain Burton has begun to issue the volumes of his subscription translation of the Arabian Nights, and its fortunate possessors will now be able to realize the full flavour of Oriental feeling. They will now have the great storehouse of Eastern folk-lore opened to them, and Captain Burton’s minute acquaintance with Eastern life makes his comments invaluable. In this respect, as well as in the freeness of the translation, the version will be distinguished from its many predecessors. Captain Burton’s preface, it may be observed, bears traces of soreness at official neglect. Indeed it seems curious that his services could not have been utilised in the Soudan, when the want of competent Arabic scholars was so severely felt.

Figaro, September 19th, 1885.

A laboured attempt is made in the Pall Mall Gazette to show that the publication of the first volume of Captain Burton’s edition of the Arabian Nights is a greater outrage on decency than that of the revelations of Mr. Stead and his associates. The comparison is monstrous and absurd. Captain Burton’s great work is only intended for men and for students who desire to acquire a masterly knowledge of Egyptian Arabic; subscribers only can obtain copies, and but a thousand have been printed.

I am glad to be able to testify to the ability with which Captain Burton has discharged the first portion of his Herculean task. The second volume will be looked forward to with much interest, though I hope attention will be paid to the translator’s appeal. Captain Burton says that nothing could be more repugnant to his feelings than the idea of these pages being placed in any other hands than the class for whose especial use the book has been prepared.

Nottingham Journal, September 19th, 1885.

But to scholars and men who have sufficient love of the soul of these sweet stories to discern the form in its true proportions, the new edition will be welcome. From an Oriental point of view the work is masterly to a degree. The quatrains and couplets, reading like verses from Elizabethan mantels, and forming a perfect rosary of Eastern lore, the constant succession of brilliant pictures, and the pleasure of meeting again our dear old friend Shahrázád, all these combine to give a unique charm and interest to this “perfect expositor of the mediæval Moslem mind.”

459

Daily Exchange, September 19th, 1885.

The first volume of Captain Burton’s Thousand Nights and a Night, printed at Benares by the Kamashastra Society for subscribers only, has been delivered to the latter. If the other nine portions equal the first, English literature will be the richer by a work the like of which is rare. The English is strong and vitally idiomatic. It is the English of Shakespeare and Jeremy Taylor, the English of Robert Browning, with a curiously varied admixture of modern colloquial phraseology. I confess that I was not prepared, familiar as I was with Captain Burton’s other work, to find so perfect a command of clear and vigorous style on the part of the great traveller and Oriental scholar. Mrs. Grundy would have protested against the public issue of The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, and Mrs. Grundy would have had reason as well as propriety on her side; but I must say that the tone of the work is singularly robust and healthy. What a treasure-house Captain Burton has opened! Until he turned the key we knew little or nothing of The Nights, the Villon Society’s issue notwithstanding, and the notes which he has added to the work have a value which is simply unique.

Continental Times, September 26th, 1885.

I have been favoured, if that is the right word to use, with a sight of Captain Burton’s new translation of the Arabian Nights. It is a sumptuous work, in an exquisite binding of gold and black, with broad pages and fine large type, such an edition as a scholar and a book lover finds after his own heart. Moreover, the translation is a wonderful bit of English. Captain Burton has by a fanciful, but on the whole, true impulse, chosen to tell the story in old English, not the English of Chaucer, but of a sufficiently archaic type. The choice of an idiom which in some degree recalls the air of the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron—to say nothing of Pantagruel and Panurge—softens the grossness of some of the stories, and gives an additionally quaint charm to the others. No one, however, will recognise at first sight the book of his childhood. The solemn invocation of Allah on the first page, the spelling of Vizier as Wazir, and of genie as Jinni, as well as the terrible frankness of some of the tales, all seem to transport us into another land than that through which we floated on the “silken sale of infancy.” On the whole, Captain Burton is right in strictly confining his work to the library and the student. The reading of it by the public generally can only spoil an immortal work for our boys and girls.

Montreal Daily Herald, September 21st, 1885.

Captain Burton has translated the Arabian Nights, but will only publish it for private distribution. A correspondent says that “all these years we have been reading Lane’s turgid emasculated selections we have been kept in the dark as to their singular beauty and vitally human strength. I have been amazed at the Nights as englished by Captain Burton in strong, vital, picturesque prose. The stories, instead of being pieces of wild extravagance, unreal and theatrically tinselly, with the limelight instead of daylight, and paste instead of diamonds, are full of abounding life.”

The Bat, September 29th, 1885.

Captain Burton, in his way, renders a gigantic service to all students of literature who are not profound Orientalists, and to many who are, by giving them a literal, honest, 460and accurate translation of the Arabian Nights. * * * Some idiotic persons here and there, and certain journals which have earned an infamous notoriety by doing their best to deprave public morals, have raised a foolish clamour against Captain Burton and his translation. Journalists, who had no objection to pandering to the worst tastes of humanity at a penny a copy, are suddenly inspired by much righteous indignation at a privately printed work which costs a guinea a volume, and in which the manners, the customs, and the language of the East are boldly represented as they were and as they are. Such critics Captain Burton, and the readers of Captain Burton’s translation, can afford to despise and to ignore. The Arabian Nights Entertainment has been the playbook of generations, the delight of the nursery and the school-room for nearly two hundred years. Now it is high time that scholars and students should be allowed to know what the Arabian Nights Entertainment really is. Lovers of Arabic have long since known something of the truth concerning the Alif Laila. It need no Burton, it needed no Payne, to tell the masters of Oriental languages that The Thousand Nights and a Night was a very different thing from what either Galland or Lane had made it out to be. Mr. Payne, in his way, rendered no slight service, Captain Burton, in his way, renders a gigantic service to all students of literature who are not profound Orientalists, and to many who are, by giving them a literal, honest, and accurate translation of the ‘Arabian Nights.’ * * * The blatant buffoons who have spoken of Captain Burton’s work indifferently only show their own ignorance of the literature of the East. Captain Burton’s work is well worth the price he charges for it to students of Eastern literatures and Eastern manners, and Eastern customs; but the misguided lunatic who invests in it in the hope of getting hold of a good thing, in the Holywell Street sense of the term, will find indeed that the fool and his money are soon parted.

The Academy, October 3rd, 1885.

As Capt. Richard F. Burton’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights is likely for several reasons to awaken a literary controversy, the following letter from Mr. John Addington Symonds in the Academy of October 3, will be read with interest. The subject upon which it touches is an important one, and one which must be regarded from a scholarly as well as a moral point of view. Mr. Symonds writes like the scholar that he is; we shall soon see how the moralists write, and if they say anything to the point we shall copy it:—

Am Hof, Davos Platz, Switzerland, September 27th, 1885.

“There is an outcry in some quarters against Capt. Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights. Only one volume of the work has reached me, and I have not as yet read the whole of it. Of the translator’s notes I will not speak, the present sample being clearly insufficient to judge by; but I wish to record a protest against the hypocrisy which condemns his text. When we invite our youth to read an unexpurgated Bible (in Hebrew and Greek, or in the authorised version), an unexpurgated Aristophanes, an unexpurgated Juvenal, an unexpurgated Boccaccio, an unexpurgated Rabelais, an unexpurgated collection of Elizabethan dramatists, including Shakespeare, and an unexpurgated Plato (in Greek or in Prof. Jowett’s English version), it is surely inconsistent to exclude the unexpurgated Arabian Nights whether in the original or in any English version, from the studies of a nation who rule India and administer Egypt.

“The qualities of Capt. Burton’s translation are similar to those of his previous literary works, and the defects of those qualities are also similar. Commanding a vast and miscellaneous vocabulary, he takes such pleasure in the use of it that sometimes he 461transgresses the unwritten laws of artistic harmony. From the point of view of language, I hold that he is too eager to seize the mot propre of his author, and to render that by any equivalent which comes to hand from field or fallow, waste or warren, hill or hedgerow, in our vernacular. Therefore, as I think, we find some coarse passages of the Arabian Nights rendered with unnecessary crudity, and some poetic passages marred by archaisms and provincialisms. But I am at a loss to perceive how Burton’s method of translation should be less applicable to the Arabian Nights than to the Lusiad. So far as, I can judge, it is better suited to the naïveté combined with stylistic subtlety of the former than to the smooth humanistic elegancies of the latter.

“This, however, is a minor point. The real question is whether a word for word version of the Arabian Nights, executed with peculiar literary vigor, exact scholarship, and rare insight into Oriental modes of thought and feeling, can under any shadow of pretence be classed with ‘the garbage of the brothels.’ In the lack of lucidity, which is supposed to distinguish English folk, our middle-class censores morum strain at the gnat of a privately circulated translation of an Arabic classic, while they daily swallow the camel of higher education based upon minute study of Greek and Latin literature. When English versions of Theocritus and Ovid, of Plato’s Phaedrus and the Ecclesiazusae, now within the reach of every school-boy, have been suppressed, then and not till then can a “plain and literal” rendering of the Arabian Nights be denied with any colour of consistency to adult readers. I am far from saying that there are not valid reasons for thus dealing with Hellenic and Graeco-Roman and Oriental literature in its totality. But let folk reckon what Anglo-Saxon Puritanism logically involves. If they desire an Anglo-Saxon Index Librorum Prohibitorum, let them equitably and consistently apply their principles of inquisitorial scrutiny to every branch of human culture.

“JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.”

The Lincoln Gazette, Saturday, October 10, 1885.

THOUSAND NIGHTS AND A NIGHT.

First Notice.

Everything comes to him who waits—even the long-promised, eagerly-expected “Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights,” by Richard F. Burton. It is a whole quarter of a century since this translation of one of the most famous books of the world was contemplated, and we are told it is the natural outcome of the well-known Pilgrimage to Medinah and Mecca. Of Captain Burton’s fitness for the task who can doubt. It was during that celebrated journey to the tomb of the Prophet that he proved himself to be an Arab—indeed, he says, in a previous state of existence he was a Bedouin. Did he not for months at a stretch lead the life of a Son of the Faithful, eat, drink, sleep, dress, speak, pray like his brother devotees, the sharpest eyes failing to pierce his disguise? He knows the ways of Eastern men—and women—as he does the society of London or Trieste. How completely at home he is with his adopted brethren he showed at Cairo, when, to the amazement of some English friends who were looking on at the noisy devotions of some “howling” Dervishes, he suddenly joined the shouting, gesticulating circle, and behaved as if to the manner born. He has qualified as a “Howler,” he holds a diploma as a master Dervish (see vol. iii. of his “Pilgrimage”), and he can initiate disciples. Clearly, to use a phrase of Arabian story, it was decreed by Allah from the beginning, and fate and fortune have arranged, that Captain Burton should be the one of all others to confer upon his countrymen the boon of the genuine unsophisticated Thousand Nights and a Night. In the whole of our literature no book is more widely known. It is spread broadcast like the Bible, Bunyan and Shakespeare; 462yet although it is in every house, and every soul in the kingdom knows something about it, yet nobody knows it as it really exists. We have only had what translators have chosen to give—selected, diluted and abridged transcripts. And of late some so-called “original” books have been published containing minor tales purloined bodily from the Nights. There have been many versions, beginning with the beautiful Augustan French example of Professor Galland, but all have failed, or rather no one has attempted, to reproduce the great Oriental masterpiece. Judged by the number of editions—a most fallacious test of merit—Lane’s three volumes, on the whole, have found greatest favour with the British public. He was too timid to give to the world the full benefit of his studies, and he kept a drawing-room audience in view. He was careful to adapt his picture to the English standard of propriety, and his suppressions and omissions are on a wholesale scale. Lord Byron said of English novelists that they give a full length of courtship and but a bust of marriage. Mr. Lane thought it expedient draw a tight veil, to tell only half the truth—in short he stops at the bust. Moreover he destroyed all the mécanique of his original, and cruelly altered the form. He did away with the charming and dramatic framework of the tales, turned the Arabian Nights into the Arabian Chapters, and too often into the Arabian Notes. The first sole and complete translation was furnished recently by Mr. John Payne, whose “Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night” is dedicated to Captain Burton. Mr. Payne printed 500 copies for private circulation, a mere drop in the ocean. His edition was instantly absorbed, clutched with avidity, and is unprocurable—unless, as has happened several times, a stray copy finds its way into the market, and is snatched up at a fancy price. It so happened that Mr. Payne and Captain Burton applied themselves to the same task quite unconscious of each other’s labour. They were running on the same rails like Adams and Leverrier, the joint discoverers of Neptune, or like Darwin and Wallace, who simultaneously evolved the theory of Natural Selection. Hearing of a competitor, Captain Burton, who was travelling to the Gold Coast, he freely offered his fellow worker precedence. Mr. Payne’s production served to whet curiosity, and the young scholars of the day applied themselves to Arabic in order to equip their minds, and to be in a more blissful state of preparation for the triumphant edition to follow. Captain Burton’s first volume in sombre black and dazzling gold—the livery of the Abbasides—made its appearance three weeks ago, and divided attention with the newly-discovered Star. It is the first volume of ten, the set issued solely to subscribers. And already, as in the case of Mr. Payne’s edition, there has been a scramble to secure it, and it is no longer to be had for love or money. The fact is, it fills a void, the world has been waiting for this chef d’œuvre, and all lovers of the Arabian Nights wonder how they have got on without it. We must break off from remarks to give some idea of the originality of the style, of the incomparable way in which the very essence and life of the East is breathed into simple straightforward Anglo-Saxon English. In certain of Captain Burton’s books he borrows words from all languages, there are not enough for his use, and he is driven to coin them. But in the character of Arabian story-teller he is simplicity itself, and whilst avoiding words of length, he introduces just enough of antique phrase as gives a bygone and poetic flavour. The most exacting and the most fastidious will be satisfied at the felicitous handling of immortal themes. A delightful characteristic is the division of the text into Nights. Lane and Payne, for peculiar reasons of their own, have both omitted to mark the breaks in the recital. But now for the first time the thread on which all is strung is clearly kept in view, and justice is done to the long drawn out episode of the young wife who saves her own neck and averts a wholesale massacre of maidens by her round of stories within stories. This is how Shahrazad begins her discourses:—

“But when it was midnight Shahrazad awoke and signalled to her sister Dunyazad, who sat up and said, ’Allah upon thee, O my sister, recite to us some new story, delightsome 463and delectable, wherewith to while away the waking hours of our latter night.’ ‘With joy and goodly gree,’ answered Shahrazad, ‘if this pious and auspicious King permit me.’ ‘Tell on,’ quoth the King, who chanced to be sleepless and restless, and therefore was pleased with the prospect of hearing her story. So Shahrazad rejoiced; and thus on the first night of the Thousand Nights and a Night, she began with the

TALE OF THE TRADER AND THE JINNI.”

“It is related, O auspicious King, that there was a merchant of the merchants who had much wealth and business in various cities. Now on a day he mounted horse and went forth to recover monies in certain towns, and the heat sore oppressed him; so he sat beneath a tree, and putting his hand into his saddle-bags, took thence some broken bread and dry dates and began to break his fast.”

The recital proceeds until

“Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day, and ceased to say her permitted say. Then quoth her sister to her, ‘How fair is thy tale, and how grateful, and how sweet and how tasteful!’ And Shahrazad answered her, ‘What is this to that I could tell thee on the coming night were I to live and the King would spare me?’ Then said the King in himself, ’By Allah, I will not slay her until I have heard the rest of her tale.’ Then the King went forth to his audience-hall, and the Wazir went with his daughter’s shroud under his arm. The King issued his orders, and promoted this and deposed that, until the end of the day; and he told the Wazir no whit of what had happened. But the Minister wondered thereat with exceeding wonder; and when the Court broke up King Shahryar entered his palace.

Now when it was the Second Night,

said Dunyazad to her sister Shahrazad, ‘O my sister, finish for us that story of the Merchant and the Jinni;’ and she answered, ‘With joy and goodly gree, if the King permit me.’”

The first volume takes us through the mazes of the stories included in the Tales of “The Trader and the Jinni,” “The Fisherman and the Jinni,” “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” “The Tale of the Three Apples,” “The Tale of Nur Al-Din Ali and his Son Badr Al-Din Hassan,” and “The Hunchback’s Tale.” The reader most familiar with the ordinary versions at once is in a new atmosphere. The novelty is startling as it is delightful. We are face to face with the veritable East, where Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad are known to us as London or Lincoln. The whole life of the people is represented, nothing is passed over or omitted. The picture is complete, and contains everything as the “white contains the black of the eye,” a phrase which, by-the-bye, in Arabic is all contained in one word. We have before alluded to the strength and beauty of the style. The felicities of expression are innumerable. What could be better than the terms to express grief and joy, “his breast broadened,” “his breast straitened,” or the words used of a person in abject terror, “I died in my skin,” or the cruelty of the scourger who persevered “till her forearm failed,” or the expression of despair “The light before his face became night,” or the grand account of the desert storm “when behold a dust cloud up-flew and grew until it walled the horizon from view.” Another speciality of Captain Burton’s edition is the Notes. He is celebrated for sowing the bottom of his pages with curiously illuminating remarks, and he has here carried out his custom in a way to astonish. He tells us that those who peruse his notes in addition to those of Lane would be complete proficients in the knowledge of Oriental practices and customs. Lane begins with Islam from Creation to the present day, and has deservedly won for his Notes the honour of a separate reprint. Captain Burton’s object in his annotations is to treat of subjects which are completely concealed from the multitude. They are utterly and entirely esoteric, and deal with matters of which books 464usually are kept clear. Indeed he has been assured by an Indian officer who had been 40 years in the East, that he was entirely ignorant of the matters revealed in these Notes. Without these marvellous elucidations the Arabian Nights would remain only half understood, but by their aid we may know as much of the Moslems as the Moslems know of themselves.

Lincoln Gazette, October 17.—No. 2. Second Notice.

In bringing out his Arabian Nights Captain Burton has made a bold attempt to dispense with the middleman the publisher. He has gone straight to the printer, he himself undertaking the business of distribution. It is time somebody should be energetic. With curious submission authors go on bearing their grievances, and sow that others may reap. Whole editions of travels are issued, and the person most concerned, the author, gets a pittance of £5. And only the other day Walt Whitman, most illustrious of American poets, and in the opinion of capable judges the most illustrious man of letters across the Atlantic, publicly announced that the profits on his writings for a whole year amounted to a few dollars. Captain Burton has broken through the bondage, and the result promises to be highly satisfactory. But he has been threatened with pains and penalties; one trade journal, the Printing Times and Lithographer, under the immediate direction of an eminent bookseller, known for his vast purchases of rare publications, announced that The Arabian Nights would be suppressed unless its tone and morals were unexceptionable! In short, publishers are exasperated, and, like the Peers, they do not see the force of being abolished. The authors, however, who sigh to be independent, must not take it for granted that the experiment is easy, or likely to be often successful. In this particular instance it is a case of the Man and the Book. There is only one Arabian Nights in the world, and only one Captain Burton. The general tone of the London press has been distinctly favourable, the Standard leading the way and other journals following suit. The Pall Mall made an effort to lodge the author in Bow Street, with its “Chief Director,” but it has likewise had the fairness to give both sides of the question, and whilst attacking on its own account, to admit letters and articles in defence of a genuine and unsophisticated translation. As we have said [in our notice of last week] Captain Burton has been explicit on the point that his edition is by no means intended for the circulating library. It is mainly for scholars, for students whose tastes lead them Eastwards, and last, but not least, it is intended as a guide for our rulers and statesmen. England, we are reminded, “the greatest Mohammedan empire in the world,” neglects Arabism, and discourages it in examinations for the Indian Civil Service, “hence, when suddenly compelled to assume the reins of Government in Moslem lands, as Afghanistan in times past, and Egypt at present, she fails after a fashion which scandalises her few friends; and her crass ignorance concerning the Oriental peoples which should most interest her exposes her to the contempt of Europe as well as of the Eastern world. The deadly blunders we commit through ignorance are brought out in the one fact, that with the English army in Suakim, during the troubles of 1883–84, not an English official in camp, after the death of the gallant and lamented Major Morice, was capable of speaking Arabic.” The Thousand Nights and a Night offers a complete picture of Eastern peoples. But the English reader must be prepared to find that the manners of Arabs and Moslems differ from his own. Eastern people look at things from a more natural and primitive point of view, and they say what they think with all the unrestraint of children. At times their plain speaking is formidable, but they are not conscious of impropriety, and their coarseness is not intentional. It is their nature to be downright, and to be communicative on subjects about which the Saxon is shy or silent, and it must be remembered 465that the separation of the sexes adds considerably to this freedom of expression. Their language is material in quality, every root is objective; as an instance, for the word soul they have no more spiritual equivalent than breath. Even the conversation between parents and children is of incredible frankness, and the Wazir of Egypt talks to his daughter, “the Lady of Beauty,” in a fashion astonishing to the West. But the Arabs are a great mixture. They are keenly alive to beauty, and every youth and every damsel is described in glowing, rapturous terms. We have heard in our own country, so far north as chilly Scotland, of a whole audience standing up in a theatre to applaud the entrance and acknowledge the charms of a beautiful woman. In the East they are far more readily subjugated, and the event is of every-day occurrence, and not a wonder. “When the people of Damascus saw Ajib’s beauty and brilliancy and perfect grace and symmetry (for he was a marvel of comeliness and winning loveliness, softer than the cool breeze of the North, sweeter than limpid waters to man in drouth, and pleasanter than the health for which sick man sueth) a mighty many followed him, whilst others ran on before and sat down on the road until he should come up, that they might gaze on him.” The Arabs are highly imaginative, and their world is peopled with supernatural beings, whilst Ovid is surpassed in the number and ingenuity of their metamorphoses. Their nerves are highly strung, they are emotional to the hysteric degree, and they do everything in the superlative fashion. They love at first sight, and one glimpse of a face is enough to set them in flames; they cease to sleep or to eat until they are admitted to the adored presence, they weep till they faint, they rend their garments, pluck their beards, buffet their faces, and after paroxysms of passion they recover sufficiently to recite verses—“and he beat his face and head and recited these couplets”—“then she recited, weeping bitterly the while”—“When the young man heard these words he wept with sore weeping, till his bosom was drenched with tears, and began reciting.” All this effervescence, so different to our rigid repression, all this exuberance of feeling is the gift of a hot climate. And, besides this easy stirring of their passions, they always live in supreme consciousness that every impulse, every act is decreed, that they drift without will of their own, and are the helpless creatures of destiny. Half their talk consists of invocations to Allah, the All-ruling, All-gracious Allah! This fatalistic element is a leading feature in the Nights. All that happens is accepted with submission, and with the conviction that nothing can be averted. The Wazir’s eye is knocked out, “as fate and fortune decreed,” the one pomegranate seed escapes destruction, and the Princess dies in consequence; the beautiful lad secreted in a cave under the earth to keep him from harm, because it is foretold by the astrologers that he will die on a certain day, meets with his death at the appointed hour despite all precautions. This is one of the myriad instances, says Captain Burton, showing “that the decrees of Anagké, Fate, Destiny, Weird are inevitable.” And yet, in the face of overwhelming evidence that Moslems in all things bow to the stroke of destiny, it is singular to note that a Turkish scholar like Mr. Redhouse, translator of the “Mesnevi,” fails to realise this most characteristic trait of Mahometan belief, and confuses it with the Christian idea of Providence and Premonition. The folk in Arabian tales, as might be expected, meet calamity in the shape of death with fortitude. The end of life is not a terror acutely feared as with us. They die easily, and when the time comes they give up the ghost without repining, although the mourning by survivors is often loud and vehement, and sometimes desperately prolonged. This facility in dying is partly due to their fatalistic philosophy, and partly it is the effect of climate. It is in rugged climes that death is appalling, and comes as the King of Terrors, but the hotter the country the easier it is to enter the Door of Darkness. All these things which make the difference between Orientals and ourselves must be taken into account by readers of Arabian story, and the coarseness, as Captain Burton shows, “is but the shade of a picture which otherwise would be all light;” 466the general tone of the Nights “is exceptionally high and pure, and the devotional fervour often rises to boiling point.” We have shown how Captain Burton has rendered the prose of the Nights, how vigorous, yet simple, is the language, how pleasant is his use of antique phrase, serving as it often does to soften the crudity of Oriental expression. In translating the poetry, which finally will amount to nearly 10,000 lines, he has again started on a path of his own. He has closely preserved the Arab form, although, as he says, an absolutely exact copy of Arabic metres is an impossibility. Like the prose, the verse belongs to three separate epochs. In the prose there are two sets of apologues or beast-fables, which may date from any remote age, one having been found on an Egyptian papyrus; we have next the fairy tales, and these were borrowed from the Persians, whose marvellous poetic old Guebres, who gave to Islamism everything it has which breathes of spiritualism or romance; and we have the histories whose proper names, such as Harun al-Rashid, with that of his Wazir, Ja’afar, give the dates. And so with the poetry. Here and there we have some grand old fragment of pre-Islamitic verse taken from the Hamásah anthology or from the “Suspended Poems;” but more common are the quotations from Abou Nowas, Amaí, and other singers of the décadence who were the ornaments of Harun al-Rashid’s court: and lastly, there are the pièces de occasion, the copies of verses made by the writer or writers of the Nights, and as a rule these are mere doggerel. When the story is a love story the poetry is abundant, the agitated youths and damsels bandying verses to express the intensity of their emotions. Some tales are nearly half verse, and then when we get into parts where the sentiment is less exalted, where the recitals are mixed with humorous touches, such as in the “Hunchback’s Tale,” or “The Barber’s Tale of Himself,” or “The Tale of the Tailor,” we have pages of nearly unbroken prose. A striking novelty in Captain Burton’s translation is the frequent occurrence of passages in cadenced prose, called in Arabic “Saj’a,” or the cooing of a dove. These melodious fragments have a charming effect on the ear. They come as dulcet-surprises, and mostly occur in highly-wrought situations; or they are used to convey a vivid sense of something exquisite in art or nature. We give one or two instances of these little eddies of song set like gems in the prose. Their introduction seems due to whim or caprice, but really is due to profound study of the situation as if the tale-teller felt suddenly compelled to break into the rhythmic strain. The prose ripples and rises to dancing measure when the King of the Age, wandering in a lonely palace, comes upon the half-petrified youth, “the Ensorcelled Prince.”

“Now when the Sultan heard the mournful voice he sprang to his feet, and following the sound found a curtain let down over the chamber door. He raised it and saw behind it a young man sitting upon a couch about a cubit above the ground: he fair to the sight a well-shaped wight, with eloquence dight, his forehead was flower-white, his cheek rosy bright, and a mole on his cheek breadth like an ambergris mite.”

It is broken again to bring into fuller notice the perfections of one of the three merry ladies of Baghdad, sitting under a silken canopy, the curtains “looped up with pearls as big as filberts and bigger.” We are told to note how eastern are the metaphors, how confused the flattery.

“Thereupon sat a lady bright of blee, with brow-beaming brilliancy, and her eyebrows were arched as for archery; her breath breathed ambergris and perfumery, and her lips were sugar to taste and carnelian to see. Her stature was straight as the letter I (the letter Alif a straight perpendicular stroke), and her face shamed the noon sun’s radiancy; and she was even as a galaxy or a dome with golden marquetry, or a bride displayed on choicest finery, or a noble maid of Araby.”

And prose is not thought adequate to do justice to the natural beauty of a garden “like one of the pleasaunces of Paradise.”

“It was a garden with trees of freshest green and ripe fruits of yellow sheen; and its birds were singing clear and keen, and rills ran wimpling through the fair terrene.”

467It is a marvel that these cadences have never been reproduced before. They have been faintly attempted by Eastwick, in his “Gulistan,” whilst Mr. Payne simply passed them over, rejected them as of no account. They fall in with Captain Burton’s plan of omitting nothing; of giving the Nights intact in the precise form in which they are enjoyed by the Oriental. Beside the verses so characteristic of exaggerated Arabic sentiment, and the rhymed cadences, let like precious stones into the gold of the prose, the proverbs embodying the proverbial wit and wisdom, are all rhymed as in the original Arabic. What Arabists think of this translation we may learn from a professed Arabist writing to this effect:—“I am free to confess, after many years study of Arabic, a comparison of your translation with the text has taught me more than many months of dry study,” whilst Englishmen who for years have lived in the East, are making the discovery that, after all, they have known little or nothing, and their education is only beginning with this version of the Arabian Nights. It is only knowledge that knows how to observe; and it is satisfactory to observe that Captain Burton’s amazing insight into Eastern peculiarities has been put to its best use in giving a true idea of the People of the Sun and a veritable version of their Book of Books. The labour expended on this edition has been enormous. The work could only have been completed by the most excessive and pertinacious application. All the same we are told it has been “a labour of love,” a task that has brought its own exceeding great reward. There is only one regret, the circulation is bound to be limited. We cannot help hoping, at some future time, a selection may be made from the ten volumes, and even as they now stand many of the stories could be read aloud. If the public cannot have the whole work, at least it might have a part, and not be shut out from a masterpiece unparalleled.

Lyttelton Times, August 25th, 1886. The New “Arabian Nights.”

Sir Richard Burton’s version of the Thousand Nights and a Night, privately printed for the use of men and scholars, is now unobtainable. The edition sold off immediately, and the price has already reached twenty-six guineas. The best critics among the thousand purchasers say that the language is wonderful, the words graceful, the rendering of thought, as well as words, most accurate, and the poetry marvellous. The Oriental purchasers say that the language is wonderful, and they declare that they have learnt more orientalism in the volumes than by long years of study.

Land and Water, September 4th, 1886.

Some time since I had occasion to speak out energetically about this same work, thinking that a book which, though running only to a small edition, might from its general interest excite the curiosity of those who saw copies of it, and that, within its luxurious covers, matters of prurient crudity might meet the prying eyes of those whom we would guard against such knowledge. * * * Of the vigorous and poetic English of Captain Burton’s translation, its freshness and virility, it is needless to speak.

United Service Gazette, September 11th.

There is a charm and fascination about Burton’s translation that enchains the reader. The Eastern beauties of expression are singularly attractive, and, under careful editing, we may rely on a rich feast of such gems of thought and poesies of imagination as only the resplendent Orient can produce.

468

Court Circular, September 11th, 1886.

Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights is a work of marvellous erudition, and a perpetual delight to Arabic scholars and all who care to read these famous stories as accurately reproduced as possible. But they contain much that is not fit reading for women and for young people.

London and Westminster Sporting Life, September 18th, 1886.

From a private note which I have received from Sir Richard Burton I judge that the supplementary volumes to the Thousand Nights and a Night will be of great and peculiar interest. Indeed the entire set will form a library of Oriental lore of unique value.

Nottingham Journal, October 6th, 1886.

That Captain Burton’s work gives delight to the subscribers may be inferred from their encomiums. One writes, “I would give passages of it to the Board Schools”; another goes so far as to say, “It is like a new Bible for beauty of expression, and can you fancy a more wondrous gift than a second inspired Book?”

Staffordshire Sentinel, Hanley, October 13th.

Honi soit qui mal y pense. Are we not living in a too-squeamish age? First an expurgated edition of the Arabian Nights from the pen of Captain Burton, now a similar act of Vandalism to that book of our boyhood, Robinson Crusoe. What there was in the pages of the immortal work of Defoe, to which even the most susceptible could take exception, is one of those things known only to the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, to whom we are indebted for this last act of Bowdlerizing.

Civil Service Gazette, November 2nd, 1886.

Whatever reason there may have been for limiting to the number of a thousand copies the original translation by Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, his literally correct, complete, and beautiful version of the Arabian Nights, The Thousand Nights and One Night tales—a work of prodigious erudition and mastery of Oriental language, literature, manners, and customs—we cannot but think it was a pity to have placed exclusively within the reach of the select, opulent, scholarly, and fastidious few that which would have been a delight and joy for ever to the less favoured of fortune—the countless millions. The “Arabian Nights Entertainments” even in the imperfect, garbled, second-hand version which has been current in England for a hundred and eighty years through the French paraphrase by Professor Galland, has been read by all classes, high and low, with admiration of the wonderful invention, marvellous adventures, oriental imagery, charming dramatic scenes, exquisite poetry, varied pictures of Eastern life and habits—with all which the collection abounds. Why, then, when a genuine translation, the work of many years, has been completed by a matchless Arab scholar, traveller, and linguist is perfected, should it be withheld from the multitude, and reserved for the 469delectation of the learned and the rich. We are of opinion that the Arabian Tales, which are so universally pleasing to the people, should not be withheld from them, as they would be practically if shut up in glass cases, among the éditions de luxe of connoisseurs.

Fun, November 2nd, 1886. New Leaves.

Apart from the learning and labour so lavishly bestowed upon the original edition, there is ever a charm of seeming enchantment surrounding these wondrous stories, which age does not abate, nor time destroy—yet the truthfulness of this translation enriches and enhances them.

Eastern Daily Press, November 13th, 1886.

I think I should like to shake the curators of the Bodleian library. Last September Sir Richard Burton applied to them through Dr. Rost, the chief librarian at the India Office, for leave to have a MS. of the Arabian Nights transferred from the Bodleian to the India Office under the custody of Dr. Rost. The request was a perfectly regular and usual one, and in Sir Richard Burton’s case it was accompanied by a distinct promise that no “indelicate or immoral” tale should be translated. There was therefore no fear that the peculiar frankness which characterised Sir Richard’s renderings of previous tales would be repeated. A month—six weeks—passed without a reply from the curators, the fact being that they had met twice without being able to get the necessary quorum of three, and once again without doing anything at all. Then Sir Richard Burton got curt note informing him that at the fourth meeting the majority of the curators were unwilling to lend the MS. At the same meeting they allowed sundry MSS. to be sent to the India Office. Now this not only implies a gross neglect of duty, but it is a wanton insult to a man who, after all, is one of the most distinguished Orientalists of his day. Burton’s Arabian Nights, disfigured as they are by the indelicacy of the original, are a masterpiece of idiomatic translation; and as a purely literary work must rank very high indeed. Moreover, the shadow of an excuse for the curator’s conduct disappeared after Sir Richard’s pledge to keep within the lines of strict propriety. After all, learned men have a sad tendency to degenerate into meddling old women.

County Gentleman, November 27th, 1887.

Sir Richard Burton’s work has been criticised in some quarters for a too obvious straining after the literal reproduction of the original. In our opinion, such a course deserves rather praise than censure. And, indeed, we would demur to the phrase “obvious straining” in connection with the great Orientalist and explorer’s wonderfully successful representation to English eyes and ears of both the meaning and the form of this marvellous mosaic of Eastern fancy and imagination. That certain words and phrases Sir Richard makes use of are unfamiliar to the British reader is perfectly true. But it must be remembered that they have been made the means of rendering intelligible unfamiliar modes of thought and feeling which are entirely beyond the reach of smug literary conventions and forms of expression. For ourselves, we can honestly say that these very outrages upon Philistine sensibility have been amongst the principal charms of this unequal and unrivalled translation—adding vastly to the vicissitudes and seeming fidelity of the work. The marvel to us has been rather—remarking the uniformly level execution of the whole—that so few verbal ingenuities of the kind referred to have been 470found necessary, and that so much of the translated prose is English undefiled, albeit of the vigorous and vertebrate order, and so much of the translated poetry has the ring of genuine English verse. We might, however, write pages in explanation of our view of the manner in which Sir Richard has discharged his task without approaching his definition of his work as “a faithful copy of the great Eastern Saga-book by preserving intact not only the spirit, but even the méchanique, the manner, and the matter.” Of the tales themselves, we can, of course, say nothing true that is new, or nothing new that is also true. No romances of intrigue and adventure, of wealth and poverty, of luxury and love, have had such universal acceptance, or received so much of that homage which is said to be the sincerest—the flattery of imitation. And this by means of the garbled and imperfect versions which have hitherto obtained currency in the Western world.

The Philadelphia, December 12th, 1887. Once More in Print.

Sir Richard F. Burton is once more in print. * * * * He has some two or three years to serve as Consul at Trieste before he is entitled to a retiring pension, and it is a grievance with the friends and admirers of “the Arabian Knight” that the government does not do a generous thing—that is, “retire” and pension him at once. There is no doubt that the prospects of a prolonged life would be strengthened if he could retire from the Consulate and fix his own dwelling place. And his literary career is by no means at an end. The third volume of “The Supplemental Nights” is to-day in the hands of the subscribers. Like all its predecessors, it contains a characteristic dedication. Thus: “To Henry Edward John, Lord Stanley of Alderly, this the most innocent volume of The Nights is inscribed by his old companion, the Author.” It would appear from the Foreword that Sir Richard Burton has had some difficulty with his work. He has reckoned without his host. He says: “The peculiar proceedings of the curators, Bodleian Library, Oxford, of which full particulars will be given in due time, have dislocated the order of my volumes. The prospectus had promised that Tome III. should contain detached extracts from the MS. known as the Wortley-Montague, and that No. IV. and part of No. V. should comprise a reproduction of the ten Tales (or eleven, including ‘The Princess of Daryabar’), which have so long generally been attributed to Professor Galland. Circumstances, however, wholly beyond my control, have now compelled me to devote the whole of this volume to the Frenchman’s stories.” What has happened? Has Sir Richard Burton’s Devils (I use the word in its legal sense) been refused permission to translate? His vials of wrath will be filled to overflowing if that sort of opposition accumulates. Already we are promised a reckoning with the Edinburgh Review. Well may the translator of The Nights be spared to deal out his “smashing blow” with characteristic vigour. He is like the late Charles Reade in this—he is never so entertaining, to the onlooker, as when he goes tooth and nail for an antagonist. The reader has no cause to complain of the dislocation of the author’s plans. Two of the most famous of the supplemental tales are given in the volume in question making it uncommonly bulky and investing it with special interest. The account of how the originals of these came into his possession is remarkable, but it is too long for citation. The two tales to which I refer are “Alaeddin, or the Wonderful Lamp,” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.” More disillusion. It is no longer Aladdin, but Alaeddin. It is not “Open sesame,” but “Open O simsin” and “Shut, O simsin” in the Forty Thieves. I dare say there are many other departures from the text of the stories which we have known from our childhood. In Sir Richard Burton’s 471version “Alaeddin” opens in this wise: “There dwelt in a city of the cities of China a man which was a tailor, withal a pauper, and he had one son, Alaeddin, hight. Now, this boy had been from his babyhood a ne’er-do-well, a scapegrace; and when he had reached his tenth year,” &c. “The Forty Thieves” opens differently. “In days of yore and in times long gone before there dwelt in a certain town of Persia two brothers, one named Kásim and the other Alí Bábá, who at their father’s demise had divided the little wealth he had left to them with equitable division, and had lost no time in wasting and spending it all.”

Academy, December 11th, 1886.

Knowing his profound Oriental scholarship, and amazing gift of tongues, and the vast range of his reading, one could not have doubted that Sir Richard Burton’s translation would be a noteworthy performance; but none, I imagine, were prepared for the fine force and old-world flavour of the style which he has forged for himself on this occasion, or for the extraordinary richness, variety, and quaintness of his vocabulary. Not only has he with characteristic masterfulness pressed into his service any and every word, English or foreign, current or obsolete, that suited his fancy or answered to the need of the moment, but he has not scrupled to coin the lacking epithet when wanted. Thus, the ape-prince is “ensorcelled;” a merchant who sells perfumes and drugs is “a perfumer-cum-druggist;” an aged man “long o’ beard,” is an “oldster;” two warriors “fall to derring-do of cut and thrust;” the Jinniyah of Bassora flies “firmamentwise;” Prince Ajib goes to sea with a fleet of “ten keel;” our old acquaintance the Hunchbacked Groom is a “Gobbo” and an “accursed carle;” one of the ladies of Baghdad wears a “mantilla;” Ja’afar the prudent minister of Harun al-Rashid, hesitates not to propose in good Scottish dialect that “each and every one of us gang his own gait;” and the porter refuses to “stump it” till he has heard the stories of the three “monoculars,” better known as the three one-eyed Kalendars, who were sons of kings. These are but a few examples taken hastily and at random; but they serve to show the curious mosaic-work of the style. “Ensorcelled,” englished from the French, is certainly ben trovato; “derring-do” is pure Spenserian; “keel” in the sense of ships, though surviving at Newcastle-on-Tyne as the name of a carrying boat, has scarcely been in literary use since the days of Verstagen and Surrey; “Gobbo” is Italian, and the porter’s refusal has a distinct Transatlantic flavour.

Lincoln Gazette, December 18th, 1886.

Few people know anything of the trouble and the travelling which Sir Richard Burton has undertaken in the accomplishment of his tremendous task. He has ransacked all the libraries of the east and west, and has often undertaken a roving but idle quest in the hope of throwing clearer light on a single disputed passage. His profound acquaintance with Oriental languages and literature is shown at every turn, and, preserving the romantic colouring of the original in a poetic rhythm of expression, he has cast his finished version in a form which is singularly picturesque. While he has wisely discarded the affected purisms under which inferior scholars love to shelter their incompetency, he does not disfigure his pages with gratuitous accents, and he manfully indulges our fond reminiscences of old friends by calling the Caliph the Caliph. Nor is it any fault of his that we miss some of our favourites from his edition, such as Cogia Hassan of the matchless diamonds and Aladdin of the marvellous lamp; for we believe that they were spurious, though wonderfully attractive, and either sprung or took new shape in the fertile fancy of that accomplished and brilliant Frenchman, M. Galland. * * * 472Still another speciality in this most complete of all Translations is the versical portion, amounting to 10,000 lines. The Arab folk break into verse, “drop into poetry,” on every occasion. When overcome by their feelings they weep and recite verses, or they swoon first and on recovery pour forth couplets or poems of many lines. Sometimes they improvise, or they quote their own Moores, Tennysons, and Shelleys. The young Prince looks at the headsman who is ordered to slay him. “I wept,” he says, “with exceeding weeping until I made him weep with me, and looking at him I began to recite these couplets.” The sentimental stories are profusely sprinkled with verse; one of the charming peculiarities of this form of utterance is its inconsequence, the verses welling up from the depths of a despairing breast, often having little or no relation to the circumstances of the moment. Mr. Lane gives a prose paraphrase of a portion of the poems, but he omits verses right and left. We quote a brief specimen from Lane and the same from Burton, and the reader will judge between them.

(Lane.)

“We tread the steps appointed for us; and the man whose steps are appointed must tread them. He whose death is decreed to take place in one land will not die in any land but that.”

(Burton.)

“Bear my body, bear my soul wheresoever you may fare,

And where you pitch the camp let my body buried lie.

Cry my name above my grave, and an answer shall return.

The meaning of my bones responsive to your cry.”

The Nights without verses are like the day without sunshine. They are a most important part of the work. They illustrate character and manners, and the allusions, often remote and strange, require explanation, which is supplied in the shape of informing foot-notes to the pages. As a characteristic example of super-sentimental exaggeration, take the hospitable welcome of a lady, long hidden under ground, whose solitude is suddenly broken by the arrival of a fair Prince.

“O youth, what sayest thou to wine?” and I answered, “Do as thou wilt.” Whereupon she went to a cupboard and took out a sealed flask of right old wine and set off the table with flowers and scented herbs and began to sing these lines:—

“Had we known of thy coming we fain had dispread The cores of our hearts on the balls of our eyes;

Our cheeks as a carpet to greet thee had thrown, And our eyelids had strown for thy feet to betread.”

If Sir Richard Burton has taken incredible pains with his “cooing cadence” and his verses, and imparted to them their true eastern colour, his personages, his array of characters, his sultans, his wazirs, princes, merchants, soldiers, slaves, his princesses, concubines, houris, slave-girls, and old women, are simply alive and exhale the living East—they are real as any creatures in Lincoln—to use Mr. Swinburne’s simile in his Sonnet on this translation of the Arabian Nights.

Weekly Dispatch, November 14th, 1887.

The curators of the Bodleian Library are determined to save morality from Sir Richard Burton, so they have refused to let him see a manuscript of The Arabian Nights, which he asked them to send to the India Office. Sir Richard has produced some queer tales in his translations of Eastern fables; but as he gave a distinct promise to the curators that nothing that transgressed propriety should be reproduced, their 473behaviour seems rather shabby. Lady Burton is publishing an expurgated edition of her husband’s work for “household reading”; but no doubt the Bodleian curators will forbid their daughters to look at it.

The Gazette, Saturday, December 18th, 1886.

The most widely circulated translations of the Nights, the countless editions, many of them illustrated, give no idea whatever of the true East, and are mere burlesques of Galland’s French version. If only parents could distinguish between the genuine and the spurious, these unsatisfactory imitations would cease to be acceptable, and children in the nursery would be allowed to drink from the real fountain. It would be quite as easy, and far better for the juveniles, to follow the story of an Ensorcelled Prince, of a Magic Horse, or a Bottled Jinni, where the colour is all true, as it is to swallow make-believe attempts of Eastern imagery. But a better time is coming for children, and for children of a greater growth. To know the Arabian Nights in all their perfection, in all their gorgeous setting, in all their bewildered variety, and in all their truth, we must look to the latest translator. For the last fifty years it is Lane’s version that has held the field, and many people, not knowing there could be anything better, accepted him as final. But, like the Horseman of Brass on the Horse of Brass in the Sea of Peril, the time has come for dethronement, and Lane must yield to a scholar of wider research, to an Orientalist who, during one part of his career, lived as a veritable Moslem, and was indistinguishable from other Moslems. Lane’s idea was to give but a portion of the Nights, to please himself and his printer and publisher as to what should be selected, what omitted. If a story resembled another story, he rejected it on the score that it might prove wearisome. For instance, he leaves out “Nur al-Din and Miriam the Girdle Girl!”—despite its great historical interest as connected with Charlemagne and his daughter—because it bears a family likeness to “Ali Shar and Zamurrud;” and because he himself felt unsympathetic he altogether discards the lively story of “Masrur and Zayn al-Mawásif,” a tale full of poetical merits with lute scenes nowhere excelled, and with the most beautiful of all the many gardens in the Nights. He passes over the truly Rabelaisian tale of “Ali the Persian and his marvellous Carpet Bag;” he omits the chivalric story of “King Omar bin al-Nu’uman and his Sons”—like cutting “Ivanhoe” out of “Waverley” novels—and for fear of ruffling susceptibilities he suppresses “The Rogueries of Dalilah” and “Mercury Ali of Cairo,” most characteristic of stories, full of fun, frisk and frolic and devilry, opening up new ideas of Eastern human nature. These are but indications of Lane’s arbitrary method, and people have submitted because quite unconscious they have been defrauded, and that treasures have been withheld. At length, however, they have the entire and perfect chrysolite. Sir Richard Burton does not pick and choose.

Various novelties distinguish the Burton edition. To begin with, a strict account is kept of the separate nights, and the interest of the opening drama is sustained throughout. On each individual Night of the whole Thousand and One we learn exactly the amount and quality of incident related. The dramatic idea which binds the whole sheaf of stories together is kept artistically in view. It is a peculiarity of the stories that so many of them are told when the speaker is on the edge of doom—hardly the moment for collected oration—and the story saves the story-teller’s life. The mighty Ifrit who cuts off the hands and feet of his lady with four strokes, and then sends her head flying, because he thinks she has betrayed him, is diverted from instant vengeance on the suspected lover by the prospect of a story.

474

Scotch News, Glasgow, December 23rd, 1886.

The first issue of Sir Richard Burton’s Arabian Nights, limited to one thousand copies, was quickly absorbed by scholars and linguists. It would have been a subject of regret had so remarkable a work remained comparatively unknown. * * * English versions of the Arabian Nights have hitherto chiefly represented them as charming fairy tales. It remained to Sir R. Burton to fully accentuate their wider meaning. In the translator’s words, their “pathos is sweet, deep and genuine, tender, simple and true.”

The morale is sound and healthy, and at times we descry vistas of a transcendental morality, the morality of Socrates in Plato.

Morning Advertiser, December 25th, 1886.

Replete with poetry, and expressed in the graceful, fluent language of the Orientals, this rendering by a master scholar is a real boon, and may be taken as a typical specimen of the perfection to be obtained in translation by the power of an author’s research and enthusiasm.

The Literary World, January 7th, 1887.

THE REAL ARABIAN NIGHTS.

To many familiar from childhood with “The Arabian Nights Entertainments,” it has come as a shock to be told that the great work, in its true form, is nevertheless still to them a sealed book; yet it would seem that the appearance of Sir Richard Burton’s translation, but a few months ago, for the first time put within the reach of the English public anything like a faithful reproduction of the original. Even this can hardly be said to be given to the public. Only a thousand copies were published, and those at a price that would have been prohibitory to the majority, if the issue had been unlimited. Another obstacle to the general enjoyment of Sir Richard Burton’s translation was, undoubtedly, the too faithful rendering of certain passages, specimens of “an exaggerated mode of expressing thought” peculiar to Orientalists.

Numbers of English readers, to whom even the incomplete and bald versions hitherto common amongst us have afforded many a delightful hour, on hearing of the Burton edition have felt themselves almost mocked as they listened to its glowing praises, and were told at the same time that it was for ever beyond their reach. Some would, perhaps, rather have never heard of it, and have been left in happy ignorance of anything better than they already had.

Now, however, all such lovers of the famous Oriental tales have consolation offered them. Lady Burton, deeply sympathising with their disappointment, and anxious, too, that her husband’s great labour, “a deep well of reading and knowledge,” should not be wasted upon a few only, has come forward with an edition of her own which, while preserving the beauty and value of the larger work, will be more accessible to general readers, and, moreover, fitted for family use. The aim she has had in view in editing has been to make as few omissions as possible, consistent with the latter requirement, on which point Lady Burton observes: “I guarantee that no mother shall regret her girl’s reading this Arabian Nights.” We may say at once that, having carefully read a considerable portion of this first volume, we think her guarantee quite made good. Of the original 3,215 pages 215 only have been omitted. The translator’s “Foreword” tells how the work came to be taken up, its system, and the conditions under which it was 475carried out, and its relation to other translations. Here is Sir R. Button’s own account of

The Object of this Version.

“Briefly, the object of this version is to show what ‘The Thousand Nights and a Night’ really is. Not, however, by straining verbum reddere verbo, but by writing as the Arab would have written in English. My work claims to be a faithful copy of the great Eastern Saga Book, by preserving intact not only the spirit, but even the mécanique, the manner of the matter. Hence, however prosy and long-drawn out be the formula, it retains the scheme of The Nights, because they are a prime feature in the original. Moreover, holding that the translator’s glory is to add something to his native tongue, while avoiding the hideous, hag-like nakedness of Torrens and the bald literalism of Lane, I have carefully englished the picturesque turns and novel expressions of the original in all their outlandishness; for instance, as when the dust-cloud raised by a tramping host is described as ‘walling the horizon.’”

Although occasionally, perhaps, the formulæ may be a little too “long-drawn out,” and some expressions too “outlandish” for the enjoyment of all, the reading is extremely easy and pleasant. There is in it a charming movement and rhythm altogether absent in the popular translations. Indeed, speaking of the translation as a whole, it is, as compared with Scott’s or Lane’s, especially the former, as a poem to a paraphrase. The very fulness of detail, far from wearying, so fills in the pictures before the mind that one is inclined to linger over them with delight. To justly compare the several translations one must place whole stories side by side. For this there is no space here; but perhaps the comparison of a few brief extracts with Lane’s well-known translation will serve to convey some idea of the greater beauty of Sir R. Burton’s. Dr. Scott’s version differs so widely from either, and is so extremely scanty, that verbal comparison with it is almost impossible. An idea of the scantiness may be formed from the fact that the matter comprised in the tenth night, according to Burton and Lane, extends in Scott from the thirty-first night to the thirty-sixth. The following passages are from the “Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad”:—

Lane.—“If of love we complain, what shall we say? Or consuming through desire, how can we escape?

Or if he send a messenger to interpret for us, he cannot convey the lover’s complaint.

Or if we would be patient, short were our existence after the loss of those we love.

Naught remaineth to us but grief and mourning, and tears streaming down our cheeks.

O you who are absent from my sight, but constantly dwelling within my heart,

Have you kept your faith to an impassioned lover who while time endureth will never change?

Or, in absence, have you forgotten that lover who, on your account is wasting away?

When the Day of Judgment shall bring us together I will beg of our Lord a protracted trial.”

Burton.—“If we ’plain of absence what shall we say? Or if pain afflict us where wend our way?

An I hire a truckman to tell my tale, The lover’s plaint is not told for pay:

If I put on patience, a lover’s life after loss of love will not last a day:

Naught is left me now but regret, repine; And tears flooding cheeks for ever and aye:

O thou who the babes of these eyes hast fled, Thou art homed in heart that shall never stray;

Would heaven I wot hast thou kept our pact, Long as streams shall flow, to have firmest say?

Or hast forgotten the weeping slave Whom groans afflict and whom griefs waylay?

Ah, when severance ends, and we side by side Rest, I’ll blame thy rigours and chide thy pride!”

476Lane.—“Then, winking to the Khaleefeh, he said, ‘There remaineth but an hour; and to-morrow we will bring them before thee, and thou shalt ask them their story.’ But the Khaleefeh refused to do so, and said, ‘I have not patience to wait so long for their history.’—Words followed words, and at last they said, ‘Who shall put the question to them?’—and one answered, ‘The Porter.’”

Burton.—“Then he winked at the Caliph and whispered to him, ‘There is but one hour of darkness left and I can bring them before thee to-morrow, when thou canst freely question them all concerning their story.’ But the Caliph raised his head haughtily, and cried out at him in wrath, saying, ‘I have no patience left for my longing to hear of them; let the Kalendars question them forthright.’ Quoth Ja’afar, ‘This is not my counsel.’ Then words ran high and talk answered talk; and they disputed as to who should first put the question, but at last all fixed upon the Porter.”

Lane.—“How good is it to pardon one able to resist! and how much more so one who is helpless!

For the sake of the friendship that subsisted between us, destroy not one for the crime of another!”

Burton.—“How fair is ruth the strong man deigns not smother! And fairest fair when shown to weakest brother:

By love’s own holy tie between us twain, Let one not suffer for the sin of other.”

Here are four other examples of the difference of language between the two translations:—

Lane.—“A damsel of tall stature, high-bosomed, fair and beautiful, and of elegant form, with a forehead like the bright new moon, eyes like those of gazelles, eyebrows like the new moon of Ramadân, cheeks resembling anemones, and a mouth like the seal of Suléyman, her countenance like the full moon in its splendour, and the forms of her bosom resembled two pomegranates of equal size.”

Burton.—“A lady of tall figure, some five feet high; a model of beauty and loveliness, brilliance, and symmetry, and perfect grace. Her forehead was flower-white; her cheeks like the anemone, ruddy bright; her eyes were those of the wild heifer or the gazelle, with eyebrows like the crescent moon, which ends Sha’aban and begins Ramuzán; her mouth was the ring of Sulayman; her lips coral-red; her teeth like a line of string pearls, or of camomile petals; and her throat recalled the antelope’s. In fine, she was like her of whom the poet said,” &c.

Lane.—“Was greatly surprised.”

Burton.—“Marvelled with exceeding wonder.”

Lane.—“Touched the chords with the ends of her fingers.”

Burton.—“Swept the strings with her finger-tips.”

Lane.—“We heard the sounds of drums and trumpets, warriors galloped about, and the air was filled with dust raised by the horses’ hoofs.”

Burton.—“We heard the tom-toming of the kettle-drum and the tantara of trumpets, and clash of cymbals; and the rattling of warmen’s lances; and the clamours of assailants, and the clanking of bits, and the neighing of steeds; while the world was canopied with dense dust and sand-clouds raised by the horses’ hoofs.”

As we said before, however, for a fair comparison we must refer our readers to the works themselves. Those who will take the pains to read Burton’s side by side with any of the received translations, will, we have no question, recognise its vast superiority in every way. On the question of fulness it is enough to say that if the remaining volumes are of the same size as the first, Burton’s contains more than half as much again as Lane’s.

477We must not omit to mention the explanatory notes. “I can hardly imagine the Nights being read to any profit by men of the West without commentary,” says Sir Richard Burton. “My annotations avoid only one subject, the parallels of European folk-lore and fabliaux which, however interesting, would overswell the bulk of a book whose speciality is anthropology.” “The scholar who adds to mine the notes of Lane, will know as much of the Moslem East, and more than many Europeans who have spent half their lives in Orient lands. Such, at least, is my belief.” The notes are brief enough not to be passed over, and are conveniently placed at foot of the page.

Referring briefly to the matter of the Arabian Nights, we cannot do better than quote the words of Sir R. Burton again:—

“The Matter of the ‘Nights.’

“The general tone is exceptionally high and pure. The devotional fervour often rises to the boiling point of fanaticism. The pathos is sweet, deep, and genuine; tender, simple, and true; utterly unlike much of our modern tinsel. Its life, strong, splendid, and multitudinous, is everywhere flavoured with that unaffected pessimism and constitutional melancholy which strike deepest root under the brightest skies and which sigh in the face of heaven:

“Vita quid est hominis? Viridis floriscula mortis;

Sole oriente oriens, sole cadente cadens.”

“Poetical justice is administered by the literary Kazi with exemplary impartiality and severity, ‘denouncing evil-doers and eulogising deeds admirably achieved.’ The morale is sound and healthy, and at times we descry vistas of transcendental morality—the morality of Socrates in Plato. It is, indeed, this unique contrast of a quaint element, childish crudities, jostling the finest and highest views of life and character, shown in the kaleidoscopic shiftings of the marvellous picture with many a ’rich truth in a tale’s pretence’; pointed by a rough, dry humour which compares well with ‘wut’; the alternations of strength and weakness, of pathos and bathos, of the boldest poetry (the diction of Job) and the boldest prose (the Egyptian of to-day), and, finally, the whole dominated everywhere by that marvellous Oriental fancy, wherein the spiritual and the supernatural are as common as the material and the natural; it is the contrast, I say, which forms the chiefest charm of The Nights, which gives it the most striking originality, and which makes it a perfect expositor of the mediæval Moslem mind.”

At the present the first volume only of the work has reached us. We shall give our readers early notice of the appearance of the remaining five.

Queen, January 27th, 1887.

As regards the text, the poetical portions are exhibited in a metrical form, and all divisions and breaks are carefully indicated. The foot-notes are both numerous and important, and they should by no means be lightly passed ever, giving, as they do, much valuable information, explanatory and illustrative, which the “home student” will profit by. This great effort will be extensively appreciated, and not a few will read and learn more than otherwise they would or could have done respecting those wonderful tribes and nations, among whom still linger so much of the lore which instructs as well as fascinates, not only themselves, but the children of the West. We have read considerable portions of this volume, and compared them with a popular English edition, and, without hesitation, we say that the style of this is far better, and the arrangement very much to be preferred. The colloquial terms and homely phrases, we presume, truly reflect the original, as do 478some other unusual forms of expression. Meanwhile, we regard the book with much satisfaction, and hope it will receive a hearty welcome from the well-instructed and inquiring reader who seeks wisdom as well as recreation.

County Gentleman, February, 1887.

Several of the stories now issued are in the form of apalogues or fables, in which the inferior animals are the chief actors and interlocutors. Amongst these we may mention, the tales of the Water Fowl and the Tortoise, the Wolf and the Fox, the Mouse and the Ichneumon, the Cat and the Crow, the Hedgehog and the Wood Pigeons, and the Sparrow and the Peacock. There is, of course, here a suggestion or a reminiscence of Æsop, but the Arabian fabulists take a line of their own. There are striking differences between the two authors or sets of authors, both in the narrative form and in the ethical quality of the moral conveyed. And this difference may, we think, on examination, be traced to national idiosyncrasy and modes of thought. The fables of the Arabian Nights have less point and conciseness, and less of harmonious subservience of details to unity of effect and impression than those of great Ethiopian. On the other hand, they have greater perfection of literary form, far more splendid imagery, and in some instances more psychological subtlety in the somewhat long-drawn disquisitive, and, indeed, disputatious dialogues in which the chief characters indulge. For our own part, we have found this introduction of the lower animal element an interesting temporary departure from the comprehensive and elaborate, and, sooth to say, somewhat monotonous representations of men and their affairs which form the staple of these gorgeous productions of an ancient Oriental loom. In the story of the Wolf and the Fox we have an example of the justification of the lex talionis, which mingles somewhat curiously with the general exhortations to mercy and forgiveness, founded on the maxims of the Sacred Books. In our notice of the first volume we made some inadequate attempt to express our admiration of the virile beauty and force of Sir Richard Burton’s translation. Only captious critics will consider that he has strained a point in his use of obsolete words and phrases, or in his happy invention of new collocations. As these are invariably conceived and expressed in the spirit of the original Arabic, they present to our mind the aspect of beauties rather than blemishes, and indisputably add to the Oriental flavour of this fine translation. The notes are in themselves a liberal education in respect of Persian and Arabian manners and customs, old and new.

Bat, February 8th, 1887.

The most marvellous collection of stories in the world is for the first time placed before the English readers. Positively for the first time. Those who know the Arabian Nights, through the charming, but ludicrously unoriental, paraphrase of Galland, or through the solid, and perhaps slightly stolid, rendering of Lane, cannot be said to know the Arabian Nights at all. It would be indeed a thousand pities if such a book as Sir Richard has made were to be entirely tabooed to the world at large and to women. The matchless wealth of fancy of the Arabian Nights, the amazing wealth of knowledge which Sir Richard Burton has accumulated about it, the glowing virile prose in which these Eastern tales have been imbued with a new vitality, all these should be the possession, not of a poor thousand students and scholars, but of all the myriad readers of books who speak the English speech * * * Now, for the first time, all that enchanted Eastern world is open to everyone. Jean Paul Richter, most delightful of German writers, has dwelt, in his great essay on education, on the importance of Oriental fiction in the education of the young. It is easy to imagine the delight with which he would have 479welcomed the masterpieces of Oriental fancy which have now, for the first time, been placed within the reach of all who care to read.

The reader passes at once into the most exquisite world of fancy, where enchanted princesses, caliphs and mock caliphs, wizards, ghouls, jinns, barmecides, kalandars, sultans, slaves, mullahs, and dancing-girls jostle one another in a mad merry world of their own, by the yellow Nile or the yellow Tigris. All the life of the East—vivid, passionate, fantastic, poetic—lives in these entrancing pages, and the reader who knows them, and knows them well, knows more about oriental life and oriental thought than many who have passed half their lives in Cairo or Bagdad.

Morning Post, February 14th, 1886.

In the volume under notice are comprised the tales from the 78th to the 275th night inclusive. They are remarkable for their originality and poetic sentiment, and the spirit of chivalry which animates the heroes. The tales of birds and beasts are fables containing a wholesome moral.

Morning Advertiser, February 26th, 1887.

The poetic imagery of the Arabic masterpiece is presented in all its naive and native charm, almost as far as such a thing is possible, when we remember the immense gulf which sunders the ideas and tongues of the Orients from our own mental methods and modes of speech. The use of rhymed prose by the translator is most judicious, and enhances the impression produced by the Arabic simile and metaphor, as in the following, where Sulayman Shah prepares to send forth his Wazir to sue for the hand of the daughter of Zahr Shah:—“Then he hied to his own house and bade make ready presents befitting Kings, of precious stones and things of price, and other matters light of load but weighty of worth, besides Arab steeds and coats of mail, such as David made, and chests of treasure for which speech hath no measure.” Again we find the same use of rhyme in the Wazir’s mention to the celibate King of the charms of the Princess:—“Know, O King, it hath come to my knowledge that King Zahr Shah, Lord of the White Land, hath a daughter of surpassing loveliness, whose charms talk and tale fail to express. She hath not her equal in this age, for she is perfect in proportion and symmetry, blackeyed as if kohl-dyed and long-locked, wee of waist and full of form.” The couplets in which many of the characters after composing their minds unbind their tongues puts the resources of the Queen’s English to some strain. Here is a specimen of how the emissary of Sulayman Shah “displayed the oratory of Wazirs and saluted the King in the language of eloquence.” When it is remembered, however, that the Arabic verse is improvised, we can afford to be charitable to the not unsuccessful effort of the translator, who has no small difficulties to cope with. It runs as follows:—

He cometh robed and bending gracefully:

O’er face and figure dews of grace sheds he:

He charms: nor characts, spells, nor grammarye

May fend the glances of those eyne from thee.

O heart! th’ art not the sole that loveth him,

So live with him while I desertion dree.

There’s naught to joy mine eyes with joyous sound

Save praise of King Zahr Shah in jubilee:

A King! albeit thou leave thy life to win

One look, that look were all sufficiency;

480And if a pious prayer thou breathe for him,

Shall join all faithful in such pious gree:

Folk of his realm! If any shirk his right for other hoping, gross unfaith I see.

Still, though the English is a little quaint, and every period in the history of the language is laid under contribution to supply material of verbiage, this very circumstance heightens the effect upon the mind of the reader of the strange scenery, the bizarre situation, and the eccentricity—according to our notions—of the characters? * * * Men who as children have revelled in this narrative of wonders, and then accepted them with implicit and ingenuous trust, will return to it again to find light shed on the customs and manners of the East. The very instructive notes elucidate the text, and so the reader may, as he peruses, not only discover delight for his fancy, but gain information about the social life of lands which, though the Western world has varied and altered over and over again, have for ages remained in their main social features unchanged so much so as to lead many observers to regard them as unchangeable. Down at the bottom of all we read, however, the great truth that human nature is much the same all the world over, and in all ages, in its joys and griefs, its gratifications and its heartburnings.

Army and Navy Gazette, February 26th, 1887.

Sir Richard Burton was a bold man when he wrote, and the Kamashastra Society of Benares was a bold society when it printed his great translation of the Arabian Nights. Yet the boldness of both has been amply justified, for never before was the golden prime of the Caliphs of Baghdad, with all its Oriental colour, brought so vividly before the reading public. Nor could any demur be made justly to the book, as the issue of a private press, because of the indelicacy, not to say pruriency, that characterised it, since it is plainly inconsistent to judge the morals of one age by the standard of another, and this translation of “The Thousand Nights and a Night” was intended not only to make accessible the great work of Arabian fiction, but also to illustrate the social conditions of those for whom it was composed. It must be remembered, moreover, that in these days refinement has progressed so rapidly that the books even which delighted our grandmothers have become too indelicate for the family circle; and, if we go on in the same direction, it is certain that ere long Swinburne will be Bowdlerised, and fifty years hence who can say that the Laureate himself will escape? There could have been no more fitting translator for the Arabian Nights than Sir Richard Burton, who is as much at home in Eastern bazaars as the very disciples of the Prophet, who has himself made the pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and to Meccah, and who, as the result of a vast experience of all phases of Oriental life, has been able to enter into the very spirit of the wondrous Arab tales. In comparing his work with that of his best predecessors, in the translation, Mr. John Payne and Mr. E. W. Lane, becomes speedily apparent that the former was weak as a linguist, while the latter driven thereto by the necessity of making a book for the family circle, used his pruning-knife much too freely, and cut out some of the very best pieces—notably, the major part of the excellent story, which is of great length, of King Omar bin al-Nu’uman and his Sons, whereof he has preserved but two small episodes. Another great advantage which Sir Richard Burton possesses over other translators is his exquisite sense of the delicate beauty of Arabic poetry, which has enabled him to preserve in his graceful rendering of the many verses scattered through the stories, much of the character of Oriental assonance and rhythm. We take an example, almost at random, from the first volume:—

“Shall the beautiful hue of the Basil fail,

Tho’ the beetle’s foot over the Basil crawl?

481And though spider and fly be its denizens,

Shall disgrace attach to the royal hall?

The cowrie, I ken, shall have currency,

But the pearl’s clear drop,—shall its value fall?”

Fun, March 2nd, 1887.

We readily repeat our expression of the high estimation in which we hold the superiority of this translation over all others. Many stories are included which have hitherto been left untold.

Bookseller, March 4th, 1887.

The progress of this charming work continues apace, in the appearance of a further volume going down to the “Five Hundred and Fifty-Seventh Night” of Shahrazad’s world-famous tales. Within the limits of the new instalment will be found several old favourites, such as Harun Al-Rashid and the Slave Girl, The Ebony (Flying) Horse, and The Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor. Sir Richard Burton’s notes which liberally accompany the text, are by no means the least entertaining portion of the book, leading, as they do, to many suggestive comparisons with Scriptural and mythological analogies, and to points of etymology as curious as they are instructive. The story of the “Death-Angel and the Rich King,” by the way, is so closely akin to the Parables of the Rich Fool and the Unjust Steward of the Gospels, that it is difficult to believe that they did not serve as the original of the Arabian counterpart.

Allen’s Indian Mail, March 7th, 1887.

On reading the first volume again and again the reflection occurred, how little—how very little—the general public know, as to the tales of which the name is familiar in every circle of society. Still more does this fact force itself into notice in the second volume. Not a story do we meet which bears a name linked with the memoirs of youth or the recollections of early age. What is the explanation? Are all the tales, which for generation after generation, have played their part in the nursery, merely idle dreams of a fanciful edition of the Thousand and One Nights or are the well-known stories reserved for the last? We cannot say: but we avow with some trepidation, that we have not hitherto met with a single friendly face amongst the two hundred and fifty divisions as yet presented to the public.

If, however, we have expected against expectation for some landmark to show us the road whereon we are travelling, it must notwithstanding, be avowed that in the present continuation of the tales there is much to interest, and perhaps more to instruct. Apart from this, there is such vast array of wisdom contained in this storehouse of experience and knowledge that the world should be wise, and, therefore, happier in learning what dangers to avoid, what virtues to cultivate, what vices to eradicate. Then, too, as regards the notes by Sir Richard Burton. It would be impossible to exaggerate their worth, their depth, or the insight that they afford into the inner life of the Arabian natives, a life of which so little is known, though so much is talked—a life which has much to recommend it—albeit Exeter Hall is loud in its dispraise, and the advocates 482of women’s rights are passionate in denunciation thereof. Like all other nations the people of the East have their faults, but who are they which presume to cast the first stone?

Lunes, January 3rd, 1887.

Few people know anything of the trouble and the travelling which Sir Richard Burton has undertaken in the accomplishment of his tremendous task. He has ransacked all the libraries of the East and West, and has often undertaken a roving but idle quest in the hope of throwing clearer light on a single disputed passage. His profound acquaintance with Oriental languages and literature is shown at every turn, and, preserving the romantic colouring of the original in a poetic rhythm of expression, he has cast his finished version in a form which is singularly picturesque.

Allen’s Indian Mail, January 17th, 1887.

The reason is not far to seek, since there never has been a really good translation of this most untranslateable of Oriental works. From such a sweeping assertion must be excluded the happy and successful effort of Mr. John Payne; but this latter work was printed for the Villon Society, and the issue being restricted to five hundred copies, while the author bound himself “not to reproduce the work in its complete form,” the version is and must ever be “caviare to the general.” Such being the case Sir Richard Burton bethought himself that he would employ his leisure hours in presenting to the public a trustworthy and withal picturesque translation of the Thousand and One Nights: and who more fitted for such task? * * * * We have no hesitation in pronouncing the present version of the Arabian Nights to be incontestably the best extant. Perfection is not given to mortals, but the tales now appear in as satisfactory a garb as is possible; and henceforth there will be no excuse should the English public fail to become familiar with a work which all should read—the time-honoured Thousand and One Nights.

Liverpool Mercury, March 26th, 1887.

We have read with mingled admiration and delight every line of Sir Richard Burton’s wonderful rendering of the world-famous but never till now adequately translated Thousand Nights and a Night. * * * * At the same time, in any literal reproduction of the ancient folk-stories of a race having different customs and modes of thought to our own there must necessarily be passages which are unsuited to modern English tastes. * * * The first writer who undertook to introduce the Nights to Europe was M. Galland, a Frenchman who made Arabic his study, and travelled not a little in the Eastern countries which border on the Mediterranean close upon two centuries ago. What he did, however, was not to translate the entire work, or even one-half of it, but to paraphrase certain selections from it, to add other stories of Eastern origin thereto, and to dress up the whole in a composite literary style which reflected the French tastes of the time far more accurately than those of the Arab tribes from whose romantic folk-lore he drew his inspiration. Other labourers in the same field—and there have been many—have but too faithfully followed upon the lines laid down by M. Galland. Until quite lately the best European paraphrase of the Nights was that of the late distinguished Orientalist, Lane; but even he took an abbreviated edition of the original as his standard, and, while omitting at least one-third 483of the stories which it contained, failed altogether to reproduce the distinctive characteristics of the remainder.