While chapters i. to xx. concern almost entirely the relations between the opposite sexes, Chapter xxi.[FN#598] which constitutes more than one-half of the book, treats largely of those unspeakable vices which as St. Paul and St. Jude show, and the pages of Petronius and other ancient authors prove, were so common in the pagan world, and which, as Burton and other travellers inform us, are still practised in the East.

“The style and language in which the Perfumed Garden is written are,” says the writer of the Foreword to the Paris edition of 1904, “of the simplest and most unpretentious kind, rising occasionally to a very high degree of eloquence, resembling, to some extent, that of the famous Thousand Nights and a Night; but, while the latter abounds in Egyptian colloquialisms, the former frequently causes the translator to pause owing to the recurrence of North African idioms and the occasional use of Berber or Kabyle words, not generally known.”  In short, the literary merits or the work are trifling.

Although Nafzawi wrote his extended Scented Garden for scholars only, he seems afterwards to have become alarmed, and to have gone in fear lest it might get into the hands of the ignorant and do harm.  So he ended it with: 

   “O you who read this, and think of the author
    And do not exempt him from blame,
    If you spare your good opinion of him, do not
    At least fail to say ‘Lord forgive us and him.’"[FN#599]

161.  Sir Richard Burton’s Translation.

It was in the autumn of 1888, as we have seen, that Sir Richard Burton, who considered the book to take, from a linguistic and ethnological point of view, a very high rank, conceived the idea of making a new translation, to be furnished with annotations of a most elaborate nature.  He called it at first, with his fondness for rhyming jingle, The Scented Garden-Site for Heart’s Delight, and finally decided upon The Scented Garden—­Man’s Heart to Gladden.  Sir Richard’s Translation was from the Algiers manuscript, a copy of which was made for him at a cost of eighty pounds, by M. O. Houdas, Professor at the Ecole des Langues Orientales Vivantes.  This was of the first twenty chapters.  Whether a copy of the 21st Chapter ever reached Sir Richard we have not been able to ascertain.  On 31st March 1890, he wrote in his Journal:  “Began, or rather resumed, Scented Garden,"[FN#600] and thenceforward he worked at it sedulously.  Now and again the Berber or Kabyle words with which the manuscript was sprinkled gave him trouble, and from time to time he submitted his difficulties to M. Fagnan, “the erudite compiler of the Catalogue of Arabic books and MSS. in the Bibliotheque Nationale d’Alger” and other Algerian correspondents.  Lady Burton describes her husband’s work as “a translation from Arabic manuscripts very difficult to get in the original” with “copious notes and explanations” of Burton’s own—­the result, indeed,