Congratulations rained in on Burton from all quarters; but the letters that gave him most pleasure were those from Mr. Ernest A. Floyer and Mr. A. C. Swinburne, whose glowing sonnet:

is well known. "Thanks to Burton's hand," exclaims the poet magnificently:

In his Poems and Ballads, 3rd Series, 1889, Mr. Swinburne pays yet another tribute to the genius of his friend. Its dedication runs:—"Inscribed to Richard F. Burton. In redemption of an old pledge and in recognition of a friendship which I must always count among the highest honours of my life."

If private persons accorded the work a hearty reception, a large section of the press greeted it with no les cordiality. "No previous editor," said The Standard, "had a tithe of Captain Burton's acquaintance with the manners and customs of the Moslem East. Apart from the language, the general tone of the Nights is exceptionally high and pure. The devotional fervour... often rises to the boiling point of fanaticism, and the pathos is sweet and deep, genuine and tender, simple and true.... In no other work is Eastern life so vividly pourtrayed. This work, illuminated with notes so full of learning, should give the nation an opportunity for wiping away that reproach of neglect which Captain Burton seems to feel more keenly than he cares to express." The St. James's Gazette called it "One of the most important translations to which a great English scholar has ever devoted himself."

Then rose a cry "Indecency, indecency! Filth, filth!" It was said, to use an Arabian Nights expression, that he had hauled up all the dead donkeys in the sea. The principal attack came from The Edinburgh Review (July 1886). "Mr. Payne's translation," says the writer, "is not only a fine piece of English, it is also, save where the exigencies of rhyme compelled a degree of looseness, remarkably literal.... Mr. Payne translates everything, and when a sentence is objectionable in Arabic, he makes it equally objectionable in English, or, rather, more so, since to the Arabs a rude freedom of speech is natural, while to us it is not." Then the reviewer turns to Burton, only, however, to empty out all the vials of his indignation—quite forgetting that the work was intended only for "curious students of Moslem manners," and not for the general public, from whom, indeed, its price alone debarred it. 494 He says: "It is bad enough in the text of the tales to find that Captain Burton is not content with plainly calling a spade a spade, but will have it styled a dirty shovel; but in his notes he goes far beyond this, and the varied collection of abominations which he brings forward with such gusto is a disgrace and a shame to printed literature.... The different versions, however, have each its proper destination—Galland for the nursery, Lane for the library, Payne for the study and Burton for the sewers." 495

Burton's spirited reply will be found in the last volume of his Supplemental Nights. Put compendiously, his argument is: "I had knowledge of certain subjects such as no other man possessed. Why should it die with me? Facts are facts, whether men are acquainted with them or not." "But," he says, "I had another object while making the notes a Repertory of Eastern knowledge in its esoteric form. Having failed to free the Anthropological Society 496 from the fetters of mauvaise honte and the mock-modesty which compels travellers and ethnographical students to keep silence concerning one side of human nature (and that side the most interesting to mankind) I proposed to supply the want in these pages.... While Pharisee and Philistine may be or may pretend to be 'shocked' and 'horrified' by my pages, the sound commonsense of a public, which is slowly but surely emancipating itself from the prudish and prurient reticences and the immodest and immoral modesties of the early 19th century, will in good time do me, I am convinced, full and ample justice."

In order to be quite ready, should prosecution ensue, Burton compiled what he called The Black Book, which consisted of specimens, of, to use his own expression, the "turpiloquium" of the Bible and Shakespeare. It was never required for its original purpose, but he worked some portions into the Terminal Essay to The Arabian Nights. 497 And here it may be said that when Burton attacks the Bible and Christianity he is inconsistent and requires to be defended against himself. The Bible, as we have seen was one of the three books that he constantly carried about with him, and few men could have had greater admiration for its more splendid passages. We know, too, that the sincere Christian had his respect. But his Terminal Essay and these notes appeared at a moment when the outcry was raised against his Arabian Nights; consequently, when he fires off with "There is no more immoral work than the Old Testament," the argument must be regarded as simply one of Tu quoque. Instead of attacking the Bible writers as he did, he should, to have been consistent, have excused them, as he excused the characters in The Arabian Nights, with: "Theirs is a coarseness of language, not of idea, &c., &c.... Such throughout the East is the language of every man, woman and child," 498 and so on. The suggestion, for example, that Ezekiel and Hosea are demoralizing because of certain expressions is too absurd for refutation. The bloodshed of the Bible horrified him; but he refused to believe that the "enormities" inflicted by the Jews on neighbouring nations were sanctioned by the Almighty. 499 "The murderous vow of Jephthah," David's inhuman treatment of the Moabites, and other events of the same category goaded him to fury.

If he attacks Christianity, nevertheless, his diatribe is not against its great Founder, but against the abuses that crept into the church even in the lifetime of His earliest followers; and again, not so much against Christianity in general as against Roman Catholicism. Still, even after making every allowance, his article is mainly a glorification of the crescent at the expense of the cross.