one or two instances of these little eddies of song set like gems in the prose.  Their introduction seems due to whim or caprice, but really is due to profound study of the situation, as if the tale-teller felt suddenly compelled to break into the rhythmic strain.  The prose ripples and rises to dancing measure when the King of the Age, wandering in a lonely palace, comes upon the half-petrified youth, “the Ensorcelled Prince.”

“Now when the Sultan heard the mournful voice he sprang to his feet, and following the sound found a curtain let down over the chamber door.  He raised it and saw behind it a young man sitting upon a couch about a cubic above the ground:  he fair to the sight, a well- shaped wight, with eloquence dight, his forehead was flower-white, his cheek rosy bright, and a mole on his cheek breadth like an ambergris mite.”

It is broken again to bring into fuller notice the perfections of one of the three merry ladies of Baghdad, sitting under a silken canopy, the curtains “looped up with pearls as big as filberts and bigger.”  We are told to note how eastern are the metaphors, how confused the flattery.

“Thereupon sat a lady bright of blee, with brow-beaming brilliancy, and her eyebrows were arched as for archery; her breath breathed ambergris and perfumery, and her lips were sugar to taste and carnelian to see.  Her stature was straight as the letter I (the letter Alif a straight perpendicular stroke), and her face shamed the noon sun’s radiancy; and she was even as a galaxy or a dome with golden marquetry, or a bride displayed on choicest finery, or a noble maid of Araby.”

And prose is not thought adequate to do justice to the natural beauty of a garden “like one of the pleasaunces of Paradise.”

“It was a garden with trees of freshest green and ripe fruits of yellow sheen; and its birds were singing clear and keen, and rills ran wimpling through the fair terrene.”

It is a marvel that these cadences have never been reproduced before.  They have been faintly attempted by Eastwick, in his “Gulistan,” whilst Mr. Payne simply passed them over, rejected them as of no account.  They fall in with Captain Burton’s plan of omitting nothing; of giving the Nights intact in the precise form in which they are enjoyed by the Oriental.  Beside the verses so characteristic of exaggerated Arabic sentiment, and the rhymed cadences, let like precious stones into the gold of the prose, the proverbs embodying the proverbial wit and wisdom are all rhymed as in the original Arabic.  What Arabists think of this translation we may learn from a professed Arabist writing to this effect:—­“I am free to confess, after many years study of Arabic, a comparison of your translation with the text has taught me more than many months of dry study,” whilst Englishmen who for years have lived in the East are making the discovery that, after all, they have known little or nothing, and their education