And now, having passed in review, and having been much scandalised by the “extravagant claims of the complete translations over the Standard Version”—­a term which properly applies only to the Editio princeps, 3 vols. 8vo—­the Edinburgh delivers a parting and insolent sting.  “The different versions, however, have each its proper destination—­Galland for the nursery, Lane for the library, Payne for the study, and Burton for the sewers” (p. 184).  I need hardly attempt to precise the ultimate and well merited office of his article:  the gall in that ink may enable it hygienically to excel for certain purposes the best of “curl-papers.”  Then our critic passes to the history of the work concerning which nothing need be said:  it is bodily borrowed from Lane’s Preface (pp. ix. xv.), and his Terminal Review (iii. 735-47) with a few unimportant and uninteresting details taken from Al-Makrizi, and probably from the studies of the late Rogers Bey (pp. 191-92).  Here the cult of the Uncle and Master emerges most extravagantly.  “It was Lane who first brought out the importance of the ‘Arabian Nights’ as constituting a picture of Moslem life and manners” (p. 192); thus wholly ignoring the claims of Galland, to whom and whom alone the honour is due.  But almost every statement concerning the French Professor involves more or less of lapse.  “It was in 1704 that Antoine Galland, sometime of the French embassy at Constantinople, but then professor at the College de France, presented the world with the contents of an Arab Manuscript which he had brought from Syria and which bore the title of ’The Thousand Nights and One Night’” (p. 167), thus ignoring the famous Il a fallu le faire venir de Syrie.  At that time (1704) Galland was still at Caen in the employ of “L’intendant Fouquet”; and he brought with him no Ms., as he himself expressly assures us in Preface to his first volume.  Here are two telling mistakes in one page, and in the next (p. 168) we find “As a professed translation Galland’s ‘Mille et une Nuits’ (N.B. the Frenchman always wrote Mille et une Nuit)[FN#455] is an audacious fraud.  “It requires something more than” audacity “to offer such misstatement even in the pages of the Edinburgh, and can anything be falser than to declare “the whole of the last fourteen tales have nothing whatever to do with the ‘Nights’”?

These bevues, which give us the fairest measure for the Reviewer’s competence to review, are followed (p. 189) by a series of obsolete assertions.  “The highest authority on this point (the date) is the late Mr. Lane, who states his unqualified conviction that the tales represent the social life of mediaerval Egypt, and he selects a period approaching the close of the fifteenth century as the probable date of collection, though some of the tales are, he believes, rather later” (p. 189).  Mr. Lane’s studies upon the subject were painfully perfunctory.  He distinctly states (Preface, p. xii.) that “the work was commenced and completed by one man,”