Mr. Payne’s edition contains notes, but they were intended simply to elucidate the text.  Though succinct, they are sufficient for the general reader.  Here and there, however, we come upon a more elaborate note, such as that upon the tuning of the lute (Vol. viii., 179), where Mr. Payne’s musical knowledge enables him to elucidate an obscure technical point.  He also identified (giving proper chapter and verse references), collated, and where needful corrected all the Koranic citations with which the text swarms, a task which demanded great labour and an intimate knowledge of the Koran.  The appropriate general information bearing on the work he gave in a succinct and artistic form in his elaborate Terminal Essay—­a masterpiece of English—­in which he condensed the result of erudition and research such as might have furnished forth several folio volumes.

138.  The Terminal Essay.

Finally there is the Terminal Essay, in which Burton deals at great length not only with the origin and history of the Nights and matters erotic, but also with unnatural practices.  This essay, with the exception of the pornographic portions, will be found, by those who take the trouble to make comparisons, to be under large obligations to Mr. Payne’s Terminal Essay, the general lines and scheme of which it follows closely.  Even Mr. Payne’s special phrases such as “sectaries of the god Wunsch,"[FN#490] are freely used, and without acknowledgement.  The portions on sexual matters, however, are entirely original.  Burton argues that the “naive indecencies of the text of The Arabian Nights are rather gaudisserie than prurience.”  “It is,” he says, “a coarseness of language, not of idea. ...  Such throughout the East is the language of every man, woman and child, from prince to peasant.”  “But,” he continues, “there is another element in the Nights, and that is one of absolute obscenity, utterly repugnant to English readers, even the least prudish.”  Still, upon this subject he offers details, because it does not enter into his plan “to ignore any theme which is interesting to the Orientalist and the Anthropologist.  To assert that such lore is unnecessary is to state, as every traveller knows, an absurdum.”

That these notes and the Terminal Essay were written in the interests of Oriental and Anthropological students may be granted, but that they were written solely in the interests of these students no one would for a moment contend.  Burton simply revelled in all studies of the kind.  Whatever was knowledge he wanted to know; and we may add whatever wasn’t knowledge.  He was insatiable.  He was like the little boy who, seeing the ocean for the first time, cried, “I want to drink it all up.”  And Burton would have drunk it all.  He would have swallowed down not only all the waters that were under the firmament but also all the creatures, palatable and unpalatable—­especially the unpalatable—­that sported therein.