few English novels of our day than in the thousands of pages of
the Arab. Here we have nothing of that most immodest modern
modesty which sees covert implication where nothing is implied,
and "improper" allusion when propriety is not outraged; nor do we
meet with the Nineteenth Century refinement; innocence of the
word not of the thought; morality of the tongue not of the heart,
and the sincere homage paid to virtue in guise of perfect
hypocrisy. It is, indeed, this unique contrast of a quaint
element, childish crudities and nursery indecencies and "vain and
amatorious" phrase jostling the finest and highest views of life
and character, shown in the kaleidoscopic shiftings of the
marvellous picture with many a "rich truth in a tale's presence",
pointed by a rough dry humour which compares well with "wut; "the
alternations of strength and weakness, of pathos and bathos, of
the boldest poetry (the diction of Job) and the baldest prose
(the Egyptian of today); the contact of religion and morality
with the orgies of African Apuleius and Petronius Arbiter--at
times taking away the reader's breath--and, finally, the whole
dominated everywhere by that marvellous Oriental fancy, wherein
the spiritual and the supernatural are as common as the material
and the natural; it is this contrast, I say, which forms the
chiefest charm of The Nights, which gives it the most striking
originality and which makes it a perfect expositor of the
medieval Moslem mind.

Explanatory notes did not enter into Mr. Payne's plan. They do
with mine: I can hardly imagine The Nights being read to any
profit by men of the West without commentary. My annotations
avoid only one subject, parallels of European folklore and
fabliaux which, however interesting, would overswell the bulk of