The critic now passes to The Uncle’s competence for the task, which he grossly exaggerates.  Mr. Lane had no “intimate acquaintance with Mahommedan life” (p. 174).  His “Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians” should have been entitled “Modern Cairenes;” he had seen nothing of Nile-land save what was shown to him by a trip to Philae in his first visit (1825-28) and another to Thebes during his second, he was profoundly ignorant of Egypt as a whole, and even in Cairo he knew nothing of woman-life and child-life—­two thirds of humanity.  I doubt if he could have understood the simplest expression in baby language; not to mention the many idioms peculiar to the Harem nursery.  The characteristic of his work is geniality combined with a true affection for his subject, but no scholar can ignore its painful superficiality.  His studies of legal theology gave him much weight with the Olema, although, at the time when he translated The Nights, his knowledge of Arabic was small.  Hence the number of lapses which disfigures his pages.  These would have been excusable in an Orientalist working out of Egypt, but Lane had a Shaykh ever at his elbow and he was always able to command the assistance of the University Mosque, Al-Azhar.  I need not enter upon the invidious task of cataloguing these errors, especially as the most glaring have been cursorily noticed in my volumes.  Mr. Lane after leaving Egypt became one of the best Arabic scholars of his day, but his fortune did not equal his deserts.  The Lexicon is a fine work although sadly deficient in the critical sense, but after the labour of thirty-four years (it began printing in 1863) it reached only the 19th letter Ghayn (p. 2386).  Then invidious Fate threw it into the hands of Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole.  With characteristic audacity he disdained to seek the services of some German Professor, an order of men which, rarely dining out and caring little for “Society,” can devote itself entirely to letters, perhaps he hearkened to the silly charge against the Teuton of minuteness and futility of research as opposed to “good old English breadth and suggestiveness of treatment.”  And the consequence has been a “continuation” which serves as a standard whereby to measure the excellence of the original work and the woful falling- off and deficiencies of the sequel—­ the latter retaining of the former naught save the covers. [FN#450]

Of Mr. Lane’s Notes I have ever spoken highly:  they are excellent and marvellously misplaced—­non erat his locus.  The text of a story-book is too frail to bear so ponderous a burden of classical Arabian lore, and the annotations injure the symmetry of the book as a work of art.  They begin with excessive prolixity:  in the Introduction these studies fill 27 closely printed pages to 14 of a text broken by cuts and vignettes.  In chaps. i. the proportion is pp. 20, notes:  15 text, and in chaps. ii. it is pp. 20:  35.  Then they become under the publisher’s protest, beautifully less; and in