table rendering of the offensive passages. "I
translate," he says **********. "People will look fierce, but ce n'est
pas mon affaire." The great value of Burton's translation is that it is
the work of a man who had travelled in all the countries in which the
scenes are laid; who had spent years in India, Egypt, Syria, Turkey and
the Barbary States, and had visited Mecca; who was intimately acquainted
with the manners and customs of the people of those countries, and who
brought to bear upon his work the experience of a lifetime. He is so
thoroughly at home all the while. Still, it is in his annotations and
not in his text that he really excells. The enormous value of these no
one would now attempt to minimize.

All over the world, as Sir Walter Besant says, "we have English
merchants, garrisons, consuls, clergymen, lawyers, physicians,
engineers, living among strange people, yet practically ignorant of
their manners and thoughts..... it wants more than a knowledge of
the tongue to become really acquainted with a people." These English
merchants, garrisons, consults and others are strangers in a strange
land. It is so very rare that a really unprejudiced man comes from a
foreign country to tell us what its people are like, that when such a
man does appear we give him our rapt attention. He may tell us much that
will shock us, but that cannot be helped.

Chapter XXIX. Burton's Notes

137. Burton's Notes.

These Notes, indeed, are the great speciality of Burton's edition of the
Nights. They are upon all manner of subjects--from the necklace of the
Pleiades to circumcision; from necromancy to the characteristics of
certain Abyssinian women; from devilish rites and ceremonies to precious
stones as prophylactics. They deal not only with matters to which the
word erotic is generally applied, but also with unnatural practices.
There are notes geographical, astrological, geomantic, bibliographical,
ethnological, anthropomorphitical; but the pornographic, one need hardly
say, hugely predominate. Burton's knowledge was encyclopaedic. Like
Kerimeddin [480] he had drunk the Second Phial of the Queen of the
Serpents. He was more inquisitive than Vathek. To be sure, he would
sometimes ask himself what was the good of it all or what indeed,
was the good of anything; and then he would relate the rebuke he once
received from an indolent Spaniard whom he had found lying on his back
smoking a cigarette. "I was studying th