The Thousand Nights and a Night offers a complete picture of Eastern peoples.  But the English reader must be prepared to find that the manners of Arabs and Moslems differ from his own.  Eastern people look at things from a more natural and primitive point of view, and they say what they think with all the unrestraint of children.  At times their plain speaking is formidable, but they are not conscious of impropriety, and their coarseness is not intentional.  It is their nature to be downright, and to be communicative on subjects about which the Saxon is shy or silent, and it must be remembered that the separation of the sexes adds considerably to this freedom of expression.  Their language is material in quality, every root is objective; as an instance, for the word soul they have no more spiritual equivalent than breath.  Even the conversation between parents and children is of incredible frankness, and the Wazir of Egypt talks to his daughter “the Lady of Beauty,” in a fashion astonishing to the West.  But the Arabs are a great mixture.  They are keenly alive to beauty, and every youth and every damsel is described in glowing, rapturous terms.  We have heard in our own country, so far north as chilly Scotland, of a whole audience standing up in a theatre to applaud the entrance and acknowledge the charms of a beautiful woman.  In the East they are far more readily subjugated, and the event is of everyday occurrence, and not a wonder.  “When the people of Damascus saw Ajib’s beauty and brilliancy and perfect grace and symmetry (for he was a marvel of comeliness and winning loveliness, softer than the cool breeze of the North, sweeter than limpid waters to man in drouth, and pleasanter than the health for which sick man sueth), a mighty many followed him, whilst others ran on before and sat down on the road until he should come up, that they might gaze on him.”  The Arabs are highly imaginative, and their world is peopled with supernatural beings, whilst Ovid is surpassed in the number and ingenuity of their metamorphoses.  Their nerves are highly strung, they are emotional to the hysteric degree, and they do everything in the superlative fashion.  They love at first sight, and one glimpse of a face is enough to set them in flames; they cease to sleep or to eat until they are admitted to the adored presence, they weep till they faint, they rend their garments, pluck their beards, buffet their faces, and after paroxysms of passion they recover sufficiently to recite verses—­“and he beat his face and head and recited these couplets”—­“then she recited, weeping bitterly the while”—­“When the young man heard these words he wept with sore weeping, till his bosom was drenched with tears and began reciting.”  All this effervescence, so different to our rigid repression, all this exuberance of feeling is the gift of a hot climate.  And, besides this easy stirring of their passions, they always live in supreme consciousness that every impulse, every act is decreed, that they drift without will