indigestible and yet useless.  What, for example, does the modern Englishman make of this, taken from the “Tale of the Wolf and the Fox,” “Follow not frowardness, for the wise forbid it; and it were most manifest frowardness to leave me in this pit draining the agony of death and dight to look upon mine own doom, whereas it lieth in thy power to deliver me from my stowre?"[FN#476] Or this:  “O rare! an but swevens[FN#477] prove true,” from “Kamar-al-Zalam ii.”  Or this “Sore pains to gar me dree,” from “The Tale of King Omar,” or scores of others that could easily be quoted.[FN#478]

Burton, alas! was also unscrupulous enough to include one tale which, he admitted to Mr. Kirby, does not appear in any redaction of the Nights, namely that about the misfortune that happened to Abu Hassan on his Wedding day.[FN#479] “But,” he added, “it is too good to be omitted.”  Of course the tale does not appear in Payne.  To the treatment meted by each translator to the coarsenesses of the Nights we have already referred.  Payne, while omitting nothing, renders such passages in literary language, whereas Burton speaks out with the bluntness and coarseness of an Urquhart.

In his letter to Mr. Payne, 22nd October 1884, he says of Mr. Payne’s translation, “The Nights are by no means literal but very readable which is the thing.”  He then refers to Mr. Payne’s rendering of a certain passage in the “Story of Sindbad and the Old Man of the Sea,” by which it appears that the complaint of want of literality refers, as usual, solely to the presentable rendering of the offensive passages.  “I translate,” he says **********.  “People will look fierce, but ce n’est pas mon affaire.”  The great value of Burton’s translation is that it is the work of a man who had travelled in all the countries in which the scenes are laid; who had spent years in India, Egypt, Syria, Turkey and the Barbary States, and had visited Mecca; who was intimately acquainted with the manners and customs of the people of those countries, and who brought to bear upon his work the experience of a lifetime.  He is so thoroughly at home all the while.  Still, it is in his annotations and not in his text that he really excells.  The enormous value of these no one would now attempt to minimize.

All over the world, as Sir Walter Besant says, “we have English merchants, garrisons, consuls, clergymen, lawyers, physicians, engineers, living among strange people, yet practically ignorant of their manners and thoughts. .... it wants more than a knowledge of the tongue to become really acquainted with a people.”  These English merchants, garrisons, consults and others are strangers in a strange land.  It is so very rare that a really unprejudiced man comes from a foreign country to tell us what its people are like, that when such a man does appear we give him our rapt attention.  He may tell us much that will shock us, but that cannot be helped.

Chapter XXIX Burton’s Notes