(3) That although Burton is occasionally happy and makes a pat couplet, like the one beginning “Kisras and Caesars,” nevertheless Payne alone writes poetry, Burton’s verse being quite unworthy of so honourable a name.  Not being, like Payne, a poet and a lord of language; and, as he admits, in his notes, not being an initiate in the methods of Arabic Prosody, Burton shirked the isometrical rendering of the verse.  Consequently we find him constantly annexing Payne’s poetry bodily, sometimes with acknowledgement, oftener without.  Thus in Night 867 he takes half a page.  Not only does he fail to reproduce agreeably the poetry of the Nights, but he shows himself incapable of properly appreciating it.  Notice, for example, his remark on the lovely poem of the Fakir at the end of the story of “Abu Al-Hasan and Abu Ja’afer the Leper,” the two versions of which we gave on a preceding page.  Burton calls it “sad doggerel,” and, as he translates it, so it is.  But Payne’s version, with its musical subtleties and choice phrases, such as “The thought of God to him his very housemate is,” is a delight to the ear and an enchantment of the sense.  Mr. Payne in his Terminal Essay singles out the original as one of the finest pieces of devotional verse in the Nights; and worthy of Vaughan or Christina Rossetti.  The gigantic nature of Payne’s achievement will be realised when we mention that The Arabian Nights contains the equivalent of some twenty thousand decasyllabic lines of poetry, that is to say more than there are in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and that he has rendered faithfully the whole of this enormous mass in accordance with the intricate metrical scheme of the original, and in felicitous and beautiful language.

(4) That Burton, who was well read in the old English poets, also introduces beautiful words.  This habit, however, is more noticeable in other passages where we come upon cilice,[FN#467] egromancy,[FN#468] verdurous,[FN#469] vergier,[FN#470] rondure,[FN#471] purfled,[FN#472] &c.  Often he uses these words with excellent effect, as, for example, “egromancy,"[FN#473] in the sentence:  “Nor will the egromancy be dispelled till he fall from the horse;” but unfortunately he is picturesque at all costs.  Thus he constantly puts “purfled” where he means “embroidered” or “sown,” and in the “Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni,” he uses incorrectly the pretty word “cucurbit"[FN#474] to express a brass pot; and many other instances might be quoted.  His lapses, indeed, indicate that he had no real sense of the value of words.  He uses them because they are pretty, forgetting that no word is attractive except in its proper place, just as colours in painting owe their value to their place in the general colour scheme.  He took most of his beautiful words from our old writers, and a few like ensorcelled[FN#475] from previous translators.  Unfortunately, too, he spoils his version by the introduction of antique words that are ugly, uncouth,