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Arabian Days’ Entertainments.  Translated from the German, by HERBERT PELHAM CORTIS.  Boston:  Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1858.

In this famous nineteenth century of ours, which prides itself on being practical, and feeds voraciously on facts, and considers itself almost above being amused, we for our part rejoice to greet such a book as this.  Our great-great-grandfathers, when they were boys, were happy in having wise and good grandfathers who told them pleasant stories of what never happened,—­and who loved well to tell them, because they were truly wise men, and knew what the child’s mind relished and fattened upon,—­nay, and because, like all truly good men, they themselves indulged a fond, secret, half-belief that these child’s stories of theirs were, if the truth could be got at, more than half true.  We should be sorry to believe that this good old life of story-telling and story-hearing had utterly gone out.  It belonged to an age that only very foolish men and very vulgar men laugh at without blushing.

“We of the nineteenth century” have a certain way of our own, however, of enjoying that most rarely fascinating class of literary productions known as stories,—­a critical, perhaps over-intellectual, way,—­but still sufficing, it is comfortable to know, to keep the story at very near its ancient dignity in the realm of letters.  Perhaps it is a true sign of the perfect story, that it ministers at once to these two unsympathizing mental appetites, and pleases completely, not only the man, but his—­by this aide—­ever-so-great-grandfather, the child.

Everybody thinks first of the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments,” when we fall into such remarks as these,—­that marvellous treasure, from which the dreams of little boys have been furnished forth, and the pages of great scholars gemmed with elegant illustration, ever since it was first opened to Western eyes.  With this book the title which Mr. Curtis has so happily selected for his translation invites us to compare it; and it is not too much praise to say that it can well stand the comparison,—­we mean as a selection of stories fascinating to old and young.  As to the matter of translation itself, the versions we have of the “Arabian Nights” are notoriously bad.  These stories, which Mr. Curtis has laid all good children and all right-minded grown people under perpetual obligation by thus collecting and presenting to them, are the productions of a single German writer, and, with the exception of three or four separately published in magazines, have, we believe, never before been translated into English.  They present some very interesting points of contrast with the ever-famous book of Eastern stories,—­such as open some very tempting cross-views of the German and the Eastern mind, which, for want of opportunity, we must pass by now.