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 the thermometer," said Burton, and I remarked, "'The glass is unusually high.' 'When I'm hot, it's hot,' commented the Spaniard, lazily, 'and when I'm cold it's cold. What more do I want to know?'" Burton, as we have seen, had for a long time devoted himself particularly to the study of vice and to everything that was bizarre and unnatural: eunuchs, pederasts, hermaphrodites, idiots, Augustus-the-Strongs, monstrosities. During his travels he never drank anything but green tea, and if Le Fanu's ideas 481 in In a Glass Darkly are to be respected, this habit is partly responsible for his extraordinary bias. He deals with subjects that are discussed in no other book. He had seen many lands, and, like Hafiz, could say:

and blighted ears some of them were. No other man could have written these notes; no other man, even if possessed of Burton's knowledge, would have dared to publish them. Practically they are a work in themselves. That they were really necessary for the elucidation of the text we would not for a moment contend. At times they fulfil this office, but more often than not the text is merely a peg upon which to hang a mass of curious learning such as few other men have ever dreamt of. The voluminous note on circumcision 482 is an instance in point. There is no doubt that he obtained his idea of esoteric annotation from Gibbon, who, though he used the Latin medium, is in this respect the true father of Burton. We will give specimens of the annotations, taken haphazard—merely premising that the most characteristic of them—those at which the saints in heaven knit their brows—necessarily in a work of this kind exclude themselves from citations:

"Laughter. 'Sweetness of her smile'(Abu al Husn and Tawaddud). Arab writers often mention the smile of beauty, but rarely, after European fashion, the laugh, which they look upon as undignified. A Moslem will say 'Don't guffaw (kahkahah) in that way; leave giggling and grinning to monkeys and Christians.' The Spaniards, a grave people, remark that Christ never laughed." 483

"Swan-maidens. 'And became three maidens' (Story of Janshah). 484 We go much too far for an explanation of the legend; a high bred girl is so much like a swan 485 in many points that the idea readily suggests itself. And it is also aided by the old Egyptian (and Platonic) belief in pre-existence, and by the Rabbinic and Buddhistic doctrine of Ante-Natal sin, to say nothing of metempsychosis. (Josephus' Antiq., xvii., 153)."

"The Firedrake. 'I am the Haunter of this place' (Ma'aruf the Cobbler). 486 Arab, Amir=one who inhabiteth. Ruins and impure places are the favourite homes of the Jinn."

"Sticking Coins on the Face. 'Sticks the gold dinar' (Ali Nur al-Din). 487 It is the custom for fast youths in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere to stick small gold pieces, mere spangles of metal, on the brows, cheeks and lips of the singing and dancing girls, and the perspiration and mask of cosmetics make them adhere for a time, till fresh movement shakes them off."

"Fillets hung on trees. 'Over the grave was a tall tree, on which hung fillets of red and green' (Otbah and Rayya). 488 Lane and many others are puzzled about the use of these articles. In many cases they are suspended to trees in order to transfer sickness from the body to the tree and to whoever shall touch it. The Sawahili people term such articles a Keti (seat or vehicle) for the mysterious haunter of the tree, who prefers occupying it to the patient's person. Briefly the custom, still popular throughout Arabia, is African and Fetish."

The value of the notes depends, of course, upon the fact that they are the result of personal observation. In his knowledge of Eastern peoples, languages and customs Burton stands alone. He is first and there is no second. His defence of his notes will be found in the last volume of his Supplemental Nights. We may quote a few sentences to show the drift of it. He says "The England of our day would fain bring up both sexes and keep all ages in profound ignorance of sexual and intersexual relations; and the consequences of that imbecility are particularly cruel and afflicting. How often do we hear women in Society lamenting that they have absolutely no knowledge of their own physiology.... Shall we ever understand that ignorance is not innocence. What an absurdum is a veteran officer who has spent a quarter of a century in the East without knowing that all Moslem women are circumcised, and without a notion of how female circumcision is effected," and then he goes on to ridicule what the "modern Englishwoman and her Anglo-American sister have become under the working of a mock modesty which too often acts cloak to real devergondage; and how Respectability unmakes what Nature made." 489

Mr. Payne's edition contains notes, but they were intended simply to elucidate the text. Though succinct, they are sufficient for the general reader. Here and there, however, we come upon a more elaborate note, such as that upon the tuning of the lute (Vol. viii., 179), where Mr. Payne's musical knowledge enables him to elucidate an obscure technical point. He also identified (giving proper chapter and verse references), collated, and where needful corrected all the Koranic citations with which the text swarms, a task which demanded great labour and an intimate knowledge of the Koran. The appropriate general information bearing on the work he gave in a succinct and artistic form in his elaborate Terminal Essay—a masterpiece of English—in which he condensed the result of erudition and research such as might have furnished forth several folio volumes.