tolerably safe by the familiar action of scissors and paste.  But—­desinit in piscem—­it ends fishily; and we find, after saturnine fashion, in cauda venenum.  It scolds me for telling the English public what it even now ignores, the properest way of cooking meat (a propos of kababs) and it “trembles to receive vols. ix. and x. for truly (from a literary point of view, of course, we mean) there seems nothing of which the translator might not be capable”—­capable de tout, as said Voltaire of Habbakuk and another agnostic Frenchman of the Prophet Zerubbabel.  This was indeed high praise considering the Saturday’s sympathy with and affection for the dead level, for the average man; but as an augury of ill it was a brutum fulmen.  No. iv. (August 30, ’87) was, strange to say, in tone almost civil and ended with a touch simulating approval:—­

“The labours of a quarter of a century,” writes the translator in L’Envoi, “are now brought to a close, and certainly no one could have been found better suited by education and taste to the task of translating the ‘Nights’ than is the accomplished author of the ‘Pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina.’  His summing up of the contents and character of ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ in the Terminal Essay is a masterpiece of careful analysis and we cannot do better than conclude our notice with a paragraph that resumes with wonderful effect the boundless imagination and variety of the picture that is conjured up before our eyes:—­

“Viewed as a tout ensemble in full and complete form, they are a drama of Eastern life and a Dance of Death made sublime by faith and the highest emotions, by the certainty of expiation and the fulness of atoning equity, where virtue is victorious, vice is vanquished and the ways of Allah are justified to man.  They are a panorama which remains kenspeckle upon the mental retina.  They form a phantasmagoria in which archangels and angels, devils and goblins, men of air, of fire, of water, naturally mingle with men of earth, where flying horses and talking fishes are utterly realistic, where King and Prince must meet fishermen and pauper, lamia and cannibal, where citizen jostles Badawi, eunuch meets knight; the Kazi hob-nobs with the thief....  The work is a kaleidoscope where everything falls into picture, gorgeous palaces and pavilions; grisly underground caves and deadly words, gardens fairer than those of the Hesperid; seas dashing with clashing billows upon enchanted mountains, valleys of the Shadow of Death, air-voyages and promenades in the abysses of the ocean, the duello, the battle, and the siege, the wooing of maidens and the marriage rite.  All the splendour and squalor, the beauty and baseness the glamour and grotesqueness, the magic and the mournfulness, the bravery and the baseness, of Oriental life are here.”