That my attempts to reproduce the form and features of the original and thee my manner of writing is well adapted to the matter appears from the consensus of the “Notices” presently to be quoted.  Mr. J. Addington Symonds pronounces the version to be executed with “peculiar literary vigour.”  Mr. Swinburne is complimentary, and even the Saturday deigns to declare “Captain Burton is certainly felicitous in the manner in which he has englished the picturesque lines of the original.”  But le style est de l’homme; and this is a matter upon which any and every educated man who writes honestly will form and express and retain his own opinion:  there are not a few who loathe “Pickwick,” and who cannot relish Vanity Fair.  So the Edinburgh Review No. 335 (pp. 174, 181), concerning which more anon, pronounces my work to be “a jumble of the vulgarest slang of all nations;” also “an unreadable compound of archaeology and ‘slang,’ abounding in Americanisms, and full of an affected reaching after obsolete or foreign words and phrases;” and finally shows the assurance to assert “Captain Burton has produced a version which is neither Arabic nor English, but which has at least the merit of being beautifully unreadable” (p. 182).

It has been circulated widely enough by the Lane-Poole clique—­poules mouillees they are called by an Arabist friend—­that I do not know Arabic.  Let me at once plead guilty to the charge, adding by way of circonstance attenuante that I know none who does know or who can thoroughly know a tongue of which we may say as did honest Izaak Walton of other two crafts, “angling be so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned.”  Most of us can master one section of a language concerning which those who use it vernacularly declare “Only Allah wotteth its entirety”, but we lack as yet the means to study it as a whole.  Older by long ages than Babel’s fabulous Tower, and covering a continuous area from Eastern Arabia to the Maghrab al-Aksa (western Mauritania), from Chaldaea in the North to southern Zanzibar, it numbers of potential vocabulary 1,200,000 words all of which may be, if they are not, used, and while they specify the finest shades of meaning, not a few of them, technically termed “Zidd,” bear significations diametrically opposite, e.g., “Maula” = lord, slave; and “’Ajuz” with 88 different meanings.  Its literature, poetic, semi-poetic and prosaic, falls into three greater sections:—­Ancient (The Suspendeds, the Kitab al-Aghani and the Koran), Mediaeval (Al-Mutanabbi, Al-Asm’ai, Abu Nowas and the poets of the Harunic cycle) and Moderns, of whom not the least important (e.g.  Yusuf al-Yazaji) are those of our own day.  Throughout its vast domain there are local differences of terminology which render every dialect a study; and of these many are intimately connected with older families, as the Egyptian with Coptic and the Moorish with Berber.  The purest speakers are still the Badawin who are often not understood