137.  Burton’s Notes.

These Notes, indeed, are the great speciality of Burton’s edition of the Nights.  They are upon all manner of subjects—­from the necklace of the Pleiades to circumcision; from necromancy to the characteristics of certain Abyssinian women; from devilish rites and ceremonies to precious stones as prophylactics.  They deal not only with matters to which the word erotic is generally applied, but also with unnatural practices.  There are notes geographical, astrological, geomantic, bibliographical, ethnological, anthropomorphitical; but the pornographic, one need hardly say, hugely predominate.  Burton’s knowledge was encyclopaedic.  Like Kerimeddin[FN#480] he had drunk the Second Phial of the Queen of the Serpents.  He was more inquisitive than Vathek.  To be sure, he would sometimes ask himself what was the good of it all or what indeed, was the good of anything; and then he would relate the rebuke he once received from an indolent Spaniard whom he had found lying on his back smoking a cigarette.  “I was studying the thermometer,” said Burton, and I remarked, “’The glass is unusually high.’  ‘When I’m hot, it’s hot,’ commented the Spaniard, lazily, ‘and when I’m cold it’s cold.  What more do I want to know?’” Burton, as we have seen, had for a long time devoted himself particularly to the study of vice and to everything that was bizarre and unnatural:  eunuchs, pederasts, hermaphrodites, idiots, Augustus-the-Strongs, monstrosities.  During his travels he never drank anything but green tea, and if Le Fanu’s ideas[FN#481] in In a Glass Darkly are to be respected, this habit is partly responsible for his extraordinary bias.  He deals with subjects that are discussed in no other book.  He had seen many lands, and, like Hafiz, could say: 

   “Plunder I bore from far and near,
    From every harvest gleaned an ear;”

and blighted ears some of them were.  No other man could have written these notes; no other man, even if possessed of Burton’s knowledge, would have dared to publish them.  Practically they are a work in themselves.  That they were really necessary for the elucidation of the text we would not for a moment contend.  At times they fulfil this office, but more often than not the text is merely a peg upon which to hang a mass of curious learning such as few other men have ever dreamt of.  The voluminous note on circumcision[FN#482] is an instance in point.  There is no doubt that he obtained his idea of esoteric annotation from Gibbon, who, though he used the Latin medium, is in this respect the true father of Burton.  We will give specimens of the annotations, taken haphazard—­merely premising that the most characteristic of them—­ those at which the saints in heaven knit their brows—­necessarily in a work of this kind exclude themselves from citations: 

“Laughter.  ’Sweetness of her smile’(Abu al Husn and Tawaddud).  Arab writers often mention the smile of beauty, but rarely, after European fashion, the laugh, which they look upon as undignified.  A Moslem will say ’Don’t guffaw (kahkahah) in that way; leave giggling and grinning to monkeys and Christians.’  The Spaniards, a grave people, remark that Christ never laughed."[FN#483]