lack of study in English linguistic which distinguished the latter part of the xviiith and the first half of the xixth centuries, when men disdaining the grammar of their own tongue, learned it from Latin and Greek; when not a few styled Shakespeare “silly-billy,” and when Lamb the essayist, wrote, “I can read, and I say it seriously, the homely old version of the Psalms for an hour or two together sometimes, without sense of weariness.”  But the reviewer will have none of my palliative process, he is surprised at my “posing as a judge of prose style,” being “acquainted with my quaint perversions of the English language” (p. 173) and, when combating my sweeping assertion that “our prose” (especially the prose of schoolmasters and professors, of savans and Orientalists) “was perhaps the worst in Europe,” he triumphantly quotes half a dozen great exceptions whose eminence goes far to prove the rule.

As regards Lane’s unjustifiable excisions the candid writer tells us everything but the truth.  As I have before noted (vol. ix. 304), the main reason was simply that the publisher, who was by no means a business man, found the work outgrowing his limits and insisted upon its coming to an untimely and, alas! a tailless end.  This is perhaps the principal cause for ignoring the longer histories, like King Omar bin al-Nu’uman (occupying 371 pages in my vols. ii. and iii.); Abu Hasan and his slave-girl Tawaddud (pp. 56, vol. v. 189-245), the Queen of the Serpents with the episodes of Bulukiya and of Janshah (pp.98, vol. v. 298-396); The Rogueries of Dalilah the Crafty and the Adventures of Mercury Ali (pp. 55, vol. vii. 144-209).  The Tale of Harun al-Rashid and Abu Hasan of Oman (pp. 19, vol. ix. 188-207) is certainly not omitted by dictations of delicacy, nor is it true of the parts omitted in general that “none could be purified without being destroyed.”  As my French friend remarks, “Few parts are so plain-spoken as the introduction, le cadre de l’ouvrage, yet M. Lane was not deterred by such situation.”  And lastly we have, amongst the uncalledfor excisions, King Jali’ad of Hind, etc. (pp. 102, vol. ix. 32-134).  The sum represents a grand total of 701 pages, while not a few of the notes are filled with unimportant fabliaux and apologues.

But the critic has been grandly deceptive, either designedly or of ignorance prepense in his arithmetic.  “There are over four hundred of these (anecdotes, fables, and stories) in the complete text, and Lane has not translated more than two hundred” (p. 172). * * * “Adding the omitted anecdotes to the omitted tales, it appears that Lane left out about a third of the whore ‘Nights,’ and of that third at least three-fourths was incompatible with a popular edition.  When Mr. Payne and Captain Burton boast of presenting the public ’with three times as much matter as any other version,’ they perhaps mean a third as much again” (p. 173). * * * “Captain Burton records his opinion that Lane has ‘omitted half and by far the more characteristic