Burton, "I like old spelling." She did
not excuse her slang by calling it old, or refer her friends to Chaucer
for "awfully glad."

The greatest pleasure of her life was now, as she oddly expresses it,
to "dress the mausoleum" on "darling Dick's anniversary." She says (21st
October 1893 to Mrs. E. J. Burton), [687] "I received your dear flowers,
and the mausoleum was quite lovely, a mass of lights and flowers sent by
relations and affectionate friends. Yours stood in front of the altar."
Then follows a delicious and very characteristic sample of Lady Burton's
English: "We had mass and communion," she says, "and crowds of friends
came down to see the mausoleum and two photographers."

She was glad to visit and decorate the Mortlake tomb certainly, but the
pleasure was a very melancholy one, and she could but say, borrowing a
thought from The Arabian Nights:

"O tomb, O tomb, thou art neither earth nor heaven unto me." [688]

When Lady Stisted died (27th December 1893), Lady Burton felt the blow
keenly, and she wrote very feelingly on the subject, "Yes," she says,
in a letter to Mrs. E. J. Burton, "I was very shocked at poor Maria's
death, and more so because I wish nothing had come between us." "Poor
Maria," she wrote to St. George Burton, "You would be surprised to know,
and I am surprised myself, how much I feel it." In a letter to Madame
de Gutmansthal-Benvenuti (10th January 1894), Lady Burton refers to the
Burton tableau to Madame Tussaud's. She says, "They have now put Richard
in the Meccan dress he wore in the desert. They have given him a large
space with sand, water, palms; and three camels, and a domed skylight,
painted yellow, throws a lurid light on the scene. It is quite
life-like. I gave them the real clothes and the real weapons, and
dressed him myself."

"I am so glad," she writes to Miss Stisted, [689] "you went to
Tussaud's, and that you admired Dick and his group. I am not quite
content with the pose. The figure looks all right when it stands up
properly, but I have always had a trouble with Tussaud about a certain
stoop which he declares is artistic, and which I say was not natural to
him."

182. The Library Edition of The Nights 1894.

Lady Burton now authorised the publication of what is called the Library
Edition of The Arabian Nights. According to the Editorial Note, while
in Lady Burton's Edition no fewer than 215 pages of the original are
wanting [690] in this edition the excisi