Edward Lane-Poole in 1879, who edited the last edition (1883) with a Preface by Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole, during a long run of forty-three years never paid the public the compliment of correcting the multitudinous errors and short comings of the translation.  Even the lengthy and longsome notes, into which The Nights have too often been merged, were left untrimmed.  Valuable in themselves and full of information, while wholly misplaced in a recueil of folk-lore, where they stand like pegs behung with the contents of the translator’s adversaria, the monographs on details of Arab life have also been exploited and reprinted under the “fatuous” title, “Arabian (for Egyptian) Society in the Middle Ages:  Studies on The Thousand and One Nights.”  They were edited by Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole (Chatto and Windus) in 1883.

At length the three volumes fell out of date, and the work was formally pronounced unreadable.  Goethe followed from afar by Emerson, had foreseen the “inevitable increase of Oriental influence upon the Occident,” and the eagerness with which the men of the West would apply themselves to the languages and literature of the East.  Such garbled and mutilated, unsexed and unsoured versions and perversions like Lane’s were felt to be survivals of the unfittest.  Mr. John Payne (for whom see my Foreword, vol. i. pp. xi.-xii.) resolved to give the world the first honest and complete version of the Thousand Nights and a Night.  He put forth samples of his work in the New Quarterly Magazine (January- April, 1879), whereupon he was incontinently assaulted by Mr. Reginald Stuart Poole, the then front of the monopolists, who after drawing up a list of fifteen errata (which were not errata) in two Nights, declared that “they must be multiplied five hundred-fold to give the sum we may expect.” (The Academy, April 26, 1879; November 29, 1881; and December 7, 1881.) The critic had the courage, or rather impudence, to fall foul of Mr. Payne’s mode and mannerism, which had long become deservedly famous, and concludes:  —­“The question of English style may for the present be dropped, as, if a translator cannot translate, it little matters in what form his results appear.  But it may lie questioned whether an Arab edifice should be decorated with old English wall-papers.”

Evidently I had scant reason to expect mercy from the clique:  I wanted none and I received none.

My reply to the arch-impostor, who

     Spreads the light wings of saffron and of blue,

will perforce be somewhat detailed:  it is necessary to answer paragraph by paragraph, and the greater part of the thirty-three pages refers more or less directly to myself.  To begin with the beginning, it caused me and many others some surprise to see the “Thousand Nights and a Night” expelled the initial list of thirteen items, as if it were held unfit for mention.  Cet article est principalement une diatribe contre l’ouorage de Sir Richard Burton et dans le libre cet ouvrage n’est meme