To sum up finally: (1) Both translations are complete, they are the only complete translations in English, and the world owes a deep debt of gratitude to both Payne and Burton.

(2) According to Arabists, Payne's Translation is the more accurate of the two. 491

(3) Burton's translation is largely a paraphrase of Payne's.

(4) Persons who are in love with the beauty of restraint as regards ornament, and hold to the doctrine which Flaubert so well understood and practised, and Pater so persistently preached will consider Payne's translation incomparably the finer.

(5) Burton's translation is for those who, caring nothing for this doctrine, revel in rococo work, a style flamboyant at all costs, and in lawless splendours; and do not mind running against expressions that are far too blunt for the majority of people.

(6) Payne's rendering of the metrical portions is poetry; Burton's scarcely verse.

(7) Burton's Terminal Essay, with the exception of the pornographic sections, is largely indebted to Payne's.

(8) The distinctive features of Burton's work are his notes and the pornographic sections of his Terminal Essay—the whole consisting of an amazing mass of esoteric learning, the result of a lifetime's study. Many of the notes have little, if any, connection with the text, and they really form an independent work.

Burton himself says: "Mr. Payne's admirable version appeals to the Orientalist and the Stylist, not to the many-headed; and mine to the anthropologist and student of Eastern manners and customs." Burton's Arabian Nights has been well summed up as "a monument of knowledge and audacity." 492

Having finished his task Burton straightway commenced the translation of a number of other Arabic tales which he eventually published as Supplemental Nights 493 in six volumes, the first two of which correspond with Mr. Payne's three volumes entitled Tales from the Arabic.