with excellent effect, as, for example, "egromancy,"
[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" [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 [475] from previous translators.
Unfortunately, too, he spoils his version by the introduction of antique
words that are ugly, uncouth, indigestible and yet useless. What, for
example, does the modern Englishman make of this, taken from the "Tale
of the Wolf and the Fox," "Follow not frowardness, for the wise forbid
it; and it were most manifest frowardness to leave me in this pit
draining the agony of death and dight to look upon mine own doom,
whereas it lieth in thy power to deliver me from my stowre?" [476] Or
this: "O rare! an but swevens [477] prove true," from "Kamar-al-Zalam
II." Or this "Sore pains to gar me dree," from "The Tale of King Omar,"
or scores of others that could easily be quoted. [478]

Burton, alas! was also unscrupulous enough to include one tale which, he
admitted to Mr. Kirby, does not appear in any redaction of the Nights,
namely that about the misfortune that happened to Abu Hassan on his
Wedding day. [479] "But," he added, "it is too good to be omitted." Of
course the tale does not appear in Payne. To the treatment meted by each
translator to the coarsenesses of the Nights we have already referred.
Payne, while omitting nothing, renders such passages in literary
language, whereas Burton speaks out with the bluntness and coarseness of
an Urquhart.

In his letter to Mr. Payne, 22nd October 1884, he says of Mr. Payne's
translation, "The Nights are by no means literal but very readable which
is the thing." He then refers to Mr. Payne's rendering of a certain
passage in the "Story of Sindbad and the Old Man of the Sea," by which
it appears that the complaint of want of literality refers, as usual,
solely to the presen