“The qualities of Capt.  Burton’s translation are similar to those of his previous literary works, and the defects of those qualities are also similar.  Commanding a vast and miscellaneous vocabulary, he takes such pleasure in the use of it that sometimes he transgresses the unwritten laws of artistic harmony.  From the point of view of language, I hold that he is too eager to seize the mot propre of his author, and to render that by any equivalent which comes to hand from field or fallow, waste or warren, hill or hedgerow, in our vernacular.  Therefore, as I think, we find some coarse passages of the Arabian Nights rendered with unnecessary crudity and some poetic passages marred by archaisms and provincialisms.  But I am at a loss to perceive how Burton’s method of translation should be less applicable to the Arabian Nights than to the Lusiad.  So far as I can judge, it is better suited to the naivete combined with stylistic subtlety of the former than to the smooth humanistic elegancies of the latter.

“This, however, is a minor point.  The real question is whether a word for word version of the Arabian Nights, executed with peculiar literary vigor, exact scholarship, and rare insight into Oriental modes of thought and feeling, can under any shadow of presence be classed with ‘the garbage of the brothels.’  In the lack of lucidity, which is supposed to distinguish English folk, our middle-class censores morum strain at the gnat of a privately circulated translation of an Arabic classic, while they daily swallow the camel of higher education based upon minute study of Greek and Latin literature.  When English versions of Theocritus and Ovid, of Plato’s Phaedrus and the Ecclesiazusae, now within the reach of every school-boy, have been suppressed, then and not till then can a ‘plain and literal’ rendering of the Arabian Nights be denied with any colour of consistency to adult readers.  I am far from saying that there are not valid reasons for thus dealing with Hellenic and Graeco-Roman and Oriental literature in its totality.  But let folk reckon what Anglo Saxon Puritanism logically involves.  If they desire an Anglo-Saxon Index Librorum Prohibitorum, let them equitably and consistently apply their principles of inquisitorial scrutiny to every branch of human culture.

“John Addington Symonds.”

The Lincoln Gazette, Saturday, October 10th, 1885. 
Thousand Nights and a Night. 
First Notice

Everything comes to him who waits—­even the long-promised, eagerly-expected “Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights,” by Richard F. Burton.  It is a whole quarter of a century since this translation of one of the most famous books of the world was contemplated, and we are told it is the natural outcome of the well-known Pilgrimage to Medinah and Mecca.  Of Captain Burton’s fitness for the task who can doubt.  It was during that celebrated journey to the tomb of the Prophet that he proved himself to be an Arab—­indeed,