of the Nights, but also angel and devil.  Both Arbuthnot and Payne regarded him as a Mohammedan.  Another friend described him as a “combination of an Agnostic, a Theist and an Oriental mystic.”  Over and over again he said to his cousin, St. George Burton, “The only real religion in the world is that of Mohammed.  Religions are climatic.  The Protestant faith suits England.”  Once he said “I should not care to go to Hell, for I should meet all my relations there, nor to Heaven, because I should have to avoid so many friends.”  Lady Burton, who prayed daily “that the windows of her husband’s soul might be opened,” relied particularly on the mediation of “Our Lady of Dale”—­the Dale referred to being a village near Ilkestone, Derbyshire, which once boasted a magnificent Premonstratensian monastery,[FN#527] and she paid for as many as a hundred masses to be said consecutively in the little “Church of Our Lady and St. Thomas,"[FN#528] at Ilkeston, in order to hasten that event.  “Some three months before Sir Richard’s death,” writes Mr. P. P. Cautley, the Vice-Consul at Trieste, to me, “I was seated at Sir Richard’s tea table with our clergy man, and the talk turning on religion, Sir Richard declared, ’I am an atheist, but I was brought up in the Church of England, and that is officially my church.’[FN#529] Perhaps, however, this should be considered to prove, not that he was an atheist, but that he could not resist the pleasure of shocking the clergyman.”

146.  Burton as a Writer.

On Burton as a writer we have already made some comments.  One goes to his books with confidence; in the assurance that whatever ever he saw is put down.  Nothing is hidden and there is no attempt to Munchausenize.  His besetting literary sin, as we said, was prolixity.  Any one of his books reduced to one-quarter, or better, one-sixth the size, and served up artistically would have made a delightful work.  As it is, they are vast storehouses filled with undusted objects of interest and value, mingled with heaps of mere lumber.  His books laid one on the top of another would make a pile eight feet high!

He is at his best when describing some daring adventure, when making a confession of his own weaknesses, or in depicting scenery.  Lieutenant Cameron’s tribute to his descriptive powers must not be passed by.  “Going over ground which he explored,” says Cameron, “with his Lake Regions of Central Africa in my hand, I was astonished at the acuteness of his perception and the correctness of his descriptions.”  Stanley spoke of his books in a similar strain.

Burton owed his success as a narrator in great measure to his habit of transferring impressions to paper the moment he received them—­ a habit to which he was led by reading a passage of Dr. Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands.  “An observer deeply impressed by any remarkable spectacle,” says Johnson, “does not suppose that the traces will soon vanish from his mind, and having commonly