or at least that “one man completed what another commenced.”  With a marvellous want of critical acumen he could not distinguish the vast difference of style and diction, treatment and sentiments, which at once strikes every intelligent reader, and which proves incontestably that many hands took part in the Great Saga-book.  He speaks of “Galland’s very imperfect Ms.,” but he never took the trouble to inspect the three volumes in question which are still in the Bibliotheque Nationale.  And when he opines that “it (the work) was most probably not commenced earlier than the fifteenth century of our era” (Pref. p. xiii.) M. Hermann Zotenberg, judging from the style of writing, would attribute the Ms. to the beginning[FN#456] of the xivth century.  The French Savant has printed a specimen page in his Histoire d’Ala al-Din (p. 6; see my Suppl. vol. iii., Foreword p. ix.); and now, at the request of sundry experts, he is preparing for publication other proofs which confirm his opinion.  We must correct Lane’s fifteenth century to thirteenth century —­a difference of only 200 years.[FN#457]

After this unhappy excursus the Reviewer proceeds to offer a most unintelligent estimate of the Great Recueil.  “Enchantment” may be “a constant motive,” but it is wholly secondary and subservient:  “the true and universal theme is love;” “‘all are but the ministers of love’ absolutely subordinate to the great theme” (p. 193).  This is the usual half-truth and whole unfact.  Love and war, or rather war and love, form the bases of all romantic fiction even as they are the motor power of the myriad forms and fashions of dancing.  This may not appear from Lane’s mangled and mutilated version which carefully omits all the tales of chivalry and conquest as the History of Gharib and his brother ’Ajib (vol. vi. 257) and that of Omar ibn Al-Nu’uman, “which is, as a whole so very unreadable” (p. 172) though by no means more so than our European romances.  But the reverse is the case with the original composition.  Again, “These romantic lovers who will go through fire to meet each other, are not in themselves interesting characters:  it may be questioned whether they have any character at all” (p. 195).  “The story and not the delineation of character is the essence of the ‘Arabian Nights’” (p. 196).  I can only marvel at the utter want of comprehension and appreciation with which this critic read what he wrote about:  one hemisphere of his brain must have been otherwise occupied and his mental cecity makes him a phenomenon even amongst reviewers.  He thus ignores all the lofty morale of the work, its marvellous pathos and humour, its tender sentiment and fine touches of portraiture, the personal individuality and the nice discrimination between the manifold heroes and heroines which combine to make it a book for all time.