pas mentionne’, writes my French friend.  This proceeding was a fair specimen of “that impartiality which every reviewer is supposed to possess.”  But the ignoble “little dodge” presently suggested itself.  The preliminary excursus (p.168) concerning the “Mille et Une Nuits (read Nuit) an audacious fraud, though not the less the best story book in the world,” affords us a useful measure of the writer’s competence in the matter of audacity and ill-judgment.  The honest and single-minded Galland is here (let us believe through that pure ignorance which haply may hope for “fool’s pardon”) grossly and unjustly vilified; and, by way of making bad worse, we are assured (p. 167) that the Frenchman “brought the Arabic manuscript from Syria”—­an infact which is surprising to the most superficial student.  “Galland was a born story teller, in the good and the bad sense” (p. 167), is a silly sneer of the true Lane-Poolean type.  The critic then compares most unadvisedly (p. 168) a passage in Galland (De Sacy edit. vol. i. 414) with the same in Mr. Payne’s (i. 260) by way of proving the “extraordinary liberties which the worthy Frenchman permitted himself to take with the Arabic”:  had he troubled himself to collate my version (i. 290-291), which is made fuller by the Breslau Edit. (ii. 190), he would have found that the Frenchman, as was his wont, abridged rather than amplified;[FN#448] although, when the original permitted exact translation, he could be literal enough.  And what doubt, may I enquire, can we have concerning “The Sleeper Awakened” (Lane, ii. 351-376), or, as I call it, “The Sleeper and the waker” (Suppl. vol.i.1-29), when it occurs in a host of MSS., not to mention the collection of tales which Prof.  Habicht converted into the Arabian Nights by breaking the text into a thousand and one sections (Bresl.  Edit. iv. 134-189, Nights cclxxii. ccxci.).  The reckless assertions that “the whole” of the last fourteen (Gallandian) tales have nothing whatever to do with “The Nights” (p. 168); and that of the histories of Zayn al-Asnam and Aladdin, “it is abundantly certain that they belong to no manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights” (p. 169), have been notably stultified by M. Hermann Zotenberg’s purchase of two volumes containing both these bones of long and vain contention.  See Foreword to my Suppl. vol. iii. pp. viii.-xi., and Mr. W. F. Kirby’s interesting notice of M. Zotenberg’s epoch-making booklet (vol. vi. p. 287).

“The first English edition was published (pace Lowndes) within eight years of Galland’s” (p. 170) states a mere error.  The second part of Galland (6 vols. 12 mo) was not issued till 1717, or two years after the translator’s death.  Of the English editio princeps the critic tells nothing, nor indeed has anyone as yet been able to tell us aught.  Of the dishonouring assertion (again let us hope made in simple ignorance) concerning “Cazotte’s barefaced forgery” (p. 170), thus slandering the memory of Jacques Cazotte, one of the most upright