the young Prince of the Black Islands, the envious Weezer and the Ghoolah, and the stories of the Porter and the Ladies of Baghdad lose nothing of their charm in the new, and, we may add, extremely unsophisticated version.  For Captain Burton’s work is not virginibus puerisque, and, while disclaiming for his version anything like intentional indecorum, he warns the readers that they will be guilty of a breach of good faith should they permit a work prepared only for students to fall into the hands of boys and girls.  From the first to almost the penultimate edition of these stories the drawing-room alone has been consulted.  Even Mr. Payne, though his otherwise faithful version was printed for the Villon Society, had the fear of Mrs. Grundy before his eyes.  Moreover, no previous editor—­not even Lane himself—­had a tithe of Captain Burton’s acquaintance with the manners and customs of the Moslem East.  Hence not unfrequently, they made ludicrous blunders and in no instance did they supply anything like the explanatory notes which have added so greatly to the value of this issue of “Alf Laylah wa Laylah.”  Some of these are startling in their realism, and often the traveller who believed that he knew something of the East, winces at the plainness with which the Wazir’s daughter tells her tales to Shahryar, King of the Banu Sasan.  The language is, however, more frequently coarse than loose, and smacks more of the childish plainness with which high and low talk in the family circles from Tangier to Malayia, than of prurience or suggestiveness.  The Oriental cannot understand that it is improper to refer in straightforward terms to anything which Allah has created or of which the Koran treats.  But in his conversation, as in his folk-lore, there is no subtle corruption or covert licentiousness—­none of the vicious suggestion and false sentiment that pervade so many of the productions of the modern romantic school.

It is, indeed, questionable whether there is much in these inimitable romances half so objectionable as many of the chapters in Rabelais and Boccaccio.  Nor do the most archaic of the passages which Captain Burton declines to “veil in the decent obscurity of a learned language” leave much room for the admirers of Shakespeare, or Greene, or Nash, or Wycherley, or Swift, or Sterne to cry shame.  Their coarseness was a reflection of the times.  The indelicacy was not offensive to those who heard it.  On the other hand, apart from the language, the general tone of “The Nights” is exceptionally high and pure.  The devotional fervour, as Captain Burton justly claims, often rises to the boiling-point of fanaticism and the pathos is sweet and deep, genuine and tender, simple and true.  Its life—­strong, splendid, and multitudinous—­is everywhere flavoured with that unaffected pessimism and constitutional melancholy which strike deepest root under the brightest skies.  The Kazi administers poetical justice with exemplary impartiality, and so healthy is the