most “elegant” writers most freely employ), “Mr. Payne laboriously searches out a corresponding term in English ‘Billingsgate,’ and prides himself upon an accurate reproduction of the tone of the original” (p. 178).  This is a remarkable twisting of the truth.  Mr. Payne persisted, despite my frequent protests, in rendering the “nursery words” and the “terms too plainly expressing natural situations” by old English such as “kaze” and “swive,” equally ignored by the “gutter” and by “Billingsgate”:  he also omitted an offensive line whenever it did not occur in all the texts and could honestly be left untranslated.  But the unfact is stated for a purpose:  here the Reviewer mounts the high horse and poses as the Magister Morum per excellentiam.  The Battle of the Books has often been fought, the crude text versus the bowdlerised and the expurgated; and our critic can contribute to the great fray only the merest platitudes.  “There is an old and trusty saying that ‘evil communications corrupt good manners,’ end it is a well-known fact that the discussion(?) and reading of depraved literature leads (sic) infallibly to the depravation of the reader’s mind” (p. 179). [FN#451] I should say that the childish indecencies and the unnatural vice of the original cannot deprave any mind save that which is perfectly prepared to be depraved; the former would provoke only curiosity and amusement to see bearded men such mere babes, and the latter would breed infinitely more disgust than desire.  The man must be prurient and lecherous as a dog-faced baboon in rut to have aught of passion excited by either.  And most inept is the conclusion, “So long as Mr. Payne’s translation remains defiled by words, sentences, and whole paragraphs descriptive of coarse and often horribly depraved sensuality, it can never stand beside Lane’s, which still remains the standard version of the Arabian Nights” (p. 179).  Altro!  No one knows better than the clique that Lane, after an artificially prolonged life of some half-century, has at last been weighed in the balance and been found wanting; that he is dying that second death which awaits the unsatisfactory worker and that his Arabian Nights are consigned by the present generation to the limbo of things obsolete and forgotten.

But if Mr. Payne is damned with poor praise and mock modesty, my version is condemned without redemption—­beyond all hope of salvation:  there is not a word in favour of a work which has been received by the reviewers with a chorus of kindly commendation.  “The critical battery opens with a round-shot.”  “Another complete translation is now appearing in a surreptitious way” (p. 179).  How “surreptitious” I ask of this scribe, who ekes not the lack of reason by a superfluity of railing, when I sent out some 24,000—­30,000 advertisements and published my project in the literary papers?  “The amiability of the two translators (Payne and Burton) was testified by their each dedicating a volume to the other.  So far as the authors are