But the blood is quickly hidden with flowers,
the bruises are tired over with cloth-of-gold, and the jolly pageant
sweeps on. Truly the comic essence is imperishable. What was fun to
them in Baghdad is fun to us in London after a thousand years.

Sacer Vates.

The prose of Mr. Payne's translation is always readable and often
elegant; Sir Richard Burton's notes and 'terminal essays' are a mine of
curious and diverting information; but for me the real author of _The
Arabian Nights_ is called not Burton nor Payne but Antoine Galland. He
it was, in truth, who gave the world as much exactly as it needed of his
preposterous original: who eliminated its tediousness, purged it of its
barbarous and sickening immorality, wiped it clean of cruelty and
unnaturalness, selected its essentials of comedy and romance, and set
them clear and sharp against a light that western eyes can bear and in an
atmosphere that western lungs can breathe. Of course the new
translations are interesting--especially to ethnologists and the critic
with a theory that translated verse is inevitably abominable. But they
are not for the general nor the artist. They include too many pages
revolting by reason of unutterable brutality of incident and point of
view--as also for the vileness of those lewd and dreadful puritans whose
excesses against humanity and whose devotion to Islam they record--to be
acceptable as literature or tolerable as reading. Now, in Galland I get
the best of them. He gave me whatever is worth remembering of Bedreddin
and Camaralzaman and that enchanting Fairy Peri-Banou; he is the true
poet alike of Abou Hassan and the Young King of the Black Islands, of Ali
Baba and the Barber of the Brothers; to him I owe that memory--of Zobeide
alone in the accursed city whose monstrous silence is broken by the voice
of the one man spared by the wrath of God as he repeats his solitary
prayer--which ranks with Crusoe's discovery of the footprint in the
thrilling moments of my life; it was he who, by refraining from the use
of pepper in his cream tarts, contrived to kitchen those confections with
the very essence of romance; it was he that clove asunder the Sultan's
kitchen-wall for me, and took me to the pan, and bade me ask a certain
question of the fish that fried therein, and made them answer me in terms
mysterious and tremendous yet. Nay, that animating and delectable
feeling I cherish ever for such enchanted commodities as gold-d