I am again the victim (Athenaeum, August 25) of that everlasting reclame.  Mr. S. Lane-Poole has contracted to “do” a life of Lord Stratford, and, ergo, he condemns me in magistral tone and a style of uncalled-for impertinence, to act as his “advt.”  In relating how, by order of the late General Beatson, then commanding Bash-buzuk (Bashi-bazuk is the advertiser’s own property), I volunteered to relieve Cars, how I laid the project before the “Great Eltchee,” how it was received with the roughest language and how my first plan was thoroughly “frustrated.”  I have told a true tale, and no more.  “A strange perversion of facts,” cries the sapient criticaster, with that normal amenity which has won for him such honour and troops of unfriends:  when his name was proposed as secretary to the R. A. S., all prophesied the speediest dissolution of that infirm body.

I am aware that Constantinople is not geographically “out of Europe.”  But when Mr. S. Lane-Poole shall have travelled a trifle more he may learn that ethnologically it is.  In fact, most of South-Eastern Europe holds itself more or less non-European, and when a Montenegrin marries a Frenchwoman or a German, his family will tell you that he has wedded a “European.”

“No one knows better than Sir R. Burton by what queer methods reputation may be annexed.”  Heavens, what English!  And what may the man mean?  But perhaps he alludes in his own silly, saltless, sneering way to my Thousand Nights and a Night, which has shown what the “Uncle and Master’s” work should have been.  Some two generations of poules mouillees have reprinted and republished Lane’s “Arabian Notes” without having the simple honesty to correct a single bevue, or to abate one blunder; while they looked upon the Arabian Nights as their own especial rotten borough.  But more of this in my tractate, “The Reviewer Reviewed,” about to be printed as an appendix to my Supplemental Volume, No. vi.

Richard F. Burton.

And here is the rejoinder (Athenaeum, September 8):—­

Lord Stratford and Sir R. Burton.

September 4, 1888.

Sir R. Burton, like a prominent Irish politician, apparently prefers to select his own venue, and, in order to answer my letter in the Athenaeum of August 25, permits himself in the Academy of September 1 an exuberance of language which can injure no one but himself.  Disregarding personalities, I observe that he advances no single fact in support of the statements which I contradicted, but merely reiterates them.  It is a question between documents and Sir R. Burton’s word.

S. Lane-Poole.

It is not a question between documents and my word, but rather of the use or abuse of documents by the “biographer.”  My volunteering for the relief of Kars was known to the whole camp at the Dardanelles, and my visit to the Embassy at Constantinople is also a matter of “documents.”  And when Mr. S. Lane-Poole shall have produced his I will produce mine.