market, and is snatched up at a fancy price.  It so happened that Mr. Payne and Captain Burton applied themselves to the same task quite unconscious of each other’s labour.  They were running on the same rails, like Adams and Leverrier, the joint discoverers of Neptune, or like Darwin and Wallace, who simultaneously evolved the theory of Natural Selection.  Hearing of a competitor, Captain Burton, who was travelling to the Gold Coast, freely offered his fellow worker precedence.  Mr. Payne’s production served to whet curiosity, and the young scholars of the day applied themselves to Arabic in order to equip their minds, and to be in a more blissful state of preparation for the triumphant edition to follow.  Captain Burton’s first volume in sombre black and dazzling gold—­the livery of the Abbasides—­made its appearance three weeks ago, and divided attention with the newly-discovered Star.  It is the first volume of ten, the set issued solely to subscribers.  And already, as in the case of Mr. Payne’s edition, there has been a scramble to secure it, and it is no longer to be had for love or money.  The fact is, it fills a void, the world has been waiting for this chef d’aeuvre, and all lovers of the Arabian Nights wonder how they have got on without it.  We must break off from remarks to give some idea of the originality of the style, of the incomparable way in which the very essence and life of the East is breathed into simple, straightforward Anglo-Saxon English.  In certain of Captain Burton’s books he borrows words from all languages, there are not enough for his use, and he is driven to coin them.  But in the character of Arabian story-teller he is simplicity itself, and whilst avoiding words of length, he introduces just enough of antique phrase as gives a bygone and poetic flavour.  The most exacting and the most fastidious will be satisfied at the felicitous handling of immortal themes.  A delightful characteristic is the division of the text into Nights.  Lane and Payne, for peculiar reasons of their own, have both omitted to mark the breaks in the recital.  But now for the first time the thread on which all is strung is clearly kept in view, and justice is done to the long drawn-out episode of the young wife who saves her own neck and averts a wholesale massacre of maidens by her round of stories within stories.

The reader most familiar with the ordinary versions at once is in a new atmosphere.  The novelty is startling as it is delightful.  We are face to face with the veritable East, where Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad are known to us as London or Lincoln.  The whole life of the people is represented, nothing is passed over or omitted.  The picture is complete, and contains everything as the “white contains the black of the eye,” a phrase which, by- the-bye, in Arabic is all contained in one word.  We have before alluded to the strength and beauty of the style.  The felicities of expression are innumerable.  What could be better than the terms to express grief