preservation would be fatal to all vigour and harmony of style.”  The English translator of Palmerin of England, Anthony Munday, attempted it in places with great success as I have before noted (vol. viii. 60); and my late friend Edward Eastwick made artistic use of it in his Gulistan.  Had I rejected the “Cadence of the cooing dove” because un-English, I should have adopted the balanced periods of the Anglican marriage service[FN#432] or the essentially English system of alliteration, requiring some such artful aid to distinguish from the vulgar recitative style the elevated and classical tirades in The Nights.  My attempt has found with reviewers more favour than I expected; and a kindly critic writes of it, “These melodious fray meets, these little eddies of song set like gems in the prose, have a charming effect on the ear.  They come as dulcet surprises and mostly recur in highly-wrought situations, or they are used to convey a vivid sense of something exquisite in nature or art.  Their introduction seems due to whim or caprice, but really it arises from a profound study of the situation, as if the Tale-teller felt suddenly compelled to break into the rhythmic strain.”

B.—­The Verse.

The Shi’r or metrical part of The Nights is considerable amounting to not less than ten thousand lines, and these I could not but render in rhyme or rather in monorhyme.  This portion has been a bugbear to translators.  De Sacy noticed the difficulty of the task (p. 283).  Lane held the poetry untranslatable because abounding in the figure Tajnis, our paronomasia or paragram, of which there are seven distinct varieties,[FN#433] not to speak of other rhetorical flourishes.  He therefore omitted the greater part of the verse as tedious and, through the loss of measure and rhyme, “generally intolerable to the reader.”  He proved his position by the bald literalism of the passages which he rendered in truly prosaic prose and succeeded in changing the facies and presentment of the work.  For the Shi’r, like the Saj’a, is not introduced arbitrarily; and its unequal distribution throughout The Nights may be accounted for by rule of art.  Some tales, like Omar bin al-Nu’man and Tawaddud, contain very little because the theme is historical or realistic; whilst in stories of love and courtship as that of Rose-in-hood, the proportion may rise to one-fifth of the whole.  And this is true to nature.  Love, as Addison said, makes even the mechanic (the British mechanic!) poetical, and Joe Hume of material memory once fought a duel about a fair object of dispute.

Before discussing the verse of The Nights it may be advisable to enlarge a little upon the prosody of the Arabs.  We know nothing of the origin of their poetry, which is lost in the depths of antiquity, and the oldest bards of whom we have any remains belong to the famous epoch of the war Al-Basus, which would place them about A.D. 500.  Moreover, when the Muse of Arabia first shows she is not only fully developed