r, abandon his
Eastern studies or his Eastern travels. Various fresh journeys or
revisitings of familiar scenes are recorded in his later books, such as
_Zanzibar_ (1872), _Ultima Thule_ (1875), _Etruscan Bologna_ (1876), _Sind
Revisited_ (1877), _The Land of Midian_ (1879) and _To the Gold Coast for
Gold_ (1883). None of these had more than a passing interest. Burton had
not the charm of style or imagination which gives immortality to a book of
travel. He wrote too fast, and took too little pains about the form. His
blunt, disconnected sentences and ill-constructed chapters were full of
information and learning, and contained not a few thrusts for the benefit
of government or other people, but they were not "readable." There was
something ponderous about his very humour, and his criticism was personal
and savage. By far the most celebrated of all his books is the translation
of the "Arabian Nights" (_The Thousand Nights and a Night_, 16 vols.,
privately printed, 1885-1888), which occupied the greater part of his
leisure at Trieste. As a monument of his Arabic learning and his
encyclopaedic knowledge of Eastern life this translation was his greatest
achievement. It is open to criticism in many ways; it is not so exact in
scholarship, nor so faithful to its avowed text, as might be expected from
his reputation; but it reveals a profound acquaintance with the vocabulary
and customs of the Muslims, with their classical idiom as well as their
vulgarest "Billingsgate," with their philosophy and modes of thought as
well as their most secret and most disgusting habits. Burton's
"anthropological notes," embracing a wide field of pornography, apart from
questions of taste, abound in valuable observations based upon long study
of the manners and the writings of the Arabs. The translation itself is
often marked by extraordinary resource and felicity in the exact
reproduction of the sense of the original; Burton's vocabulary was
marvellously extensive, and he had a genius for hitting upon the right
word; but his fancy for archaic words and phrases, his habit of coining
words, and the harsh and rugged style he affected, detract from the
literary quality of the work without in any degree enhancing its fidelity.
With grave defects, but sometimes brilliant merits, the translation holds a
mirror to its author. He was, as has been well said, an Elizabethan born
out of time; in the days of Drake his very faults might have counted to his
cre