e best passages in his Mecca and other books show. In order to ensure
originality he ought to have translated every sentence before looking to
see how Payne put it, but the temptation was too great for a very busy
man--a man with a hundred irons in the fire--and he fell. [465]

(2) That, where there are differences, Payne's translation is invariably
the clearer, finer and more stately of the two. Payne is concise, Burton
diffuse. [466]

(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, [467] egromancy, [468]
verdurous, [469] vergier, [470] rondure, [471] purfled, [472] &c. Often
he uses these words