We now come to the crucial matter of my version, the annotative concerning which this “decent gentleman,” as we suppose this critic would entitle himself (p. 185), finds a fair channel of discharge for vituperative rhetoric.  But before entering upon this subject I must be allowed to repeat a twice-told tale and once more to give the raison d’etre of my long labour.  When a friend asked me point-blank why I was bringing out my translation so soon after another and a most scholarly version, my reply was as follows:—­“Sundry students of Orientalism assure me that they are anxious to have the work in its crudest and most realistic form.  I have received letters saying, Let us know (you who can) what the Arab of The Nights was:  if good and high-minded let us see him:  if witty and humorous let us hear him:  if coarse and uncultivated, rude, childish and indecent, still let us have him to the very letter.  We want for once the genuine man.  We would have a mediaeval Arab telling the tales and traditions with the lays and legends of his own land in his own way, and showing the world what he has remained and how he has survived to this day, while we Westerns have progressed in culture and refinement.  Above all things give us the naive and plain-spoken language of the original—­such a contrast with the English of our times—­and show us, by the side of these enfantillages, the accumulated wit and wisdom, life-knowledge and experience of an old-world race.  We want also the technique of the Recueil, its division into nights, its monorhyme, in fact everything that gives it cachet and character.”  Now I could satisfy the longing, which is legitimate enough, only by annotation, by a running commentary, as it were, enabling the student to read between the lines and to understand hints and innuendoes that would otherwise have passed by wholly unheeded.  I determined that subscribers should find in my book what does not occur in any other, making it a repertory of Eastern knowledge in its esoteric phase, by no means intended for the many-headed but solely for the few who are not too wise to learn or so ignorant as to ignore their own ignorance.  I regretted to display the gross and bestial vices of the original, in the rare places where obscenity becomes rampant, but not the less I held it my duty to translate the text word for word, instead of garbling it and mangling it by perversion and castration.  My rendering (I promised) would be something novel, wholly different from all other versions, and it would leave very little for any future interpreter.[FN#453]

And I resolved that, in case of the spiteful philanthropy and the rabid pornophobic suggestion of certain ornaments of the Home-Press being acted upon, to appear in Court with my version of The Nights in one hand and bearing in the other the Bible (especially the Old Testament, a free translation from an ancient Oriental work) and Shakespeare, with Petronius Arbiter and Rabelais by way of support and reserve.  The two former