neatly,
and with so quaint a travesty of romantic situation. But the main story,
as admitted above, is _assommant_, though, just before the breach, a
substitution of three agreeable damsels for the nymph herself promises
something better.

This combination of the dullest with some of the finest and most
characteristic work of the author, would be rather a puzzle in a more
"serious" writer than Hamilton; but in his case there is no need to
distress, or in any way to cumber, oneself about the matter. The whole
thing was a "compliment," as the age would have said, to Fantasy; and
the rules of the Court of Quintessence, though not non-existent as dull
fools suppose, are singularly elastic to skilled players.

We are left with what, even as it exists, is by far his most ambitious
attempt, and with one in which, considering all its actual features, one
need not be taking things too seriously if one decides that he had an
aim at something like a whole--even if the legends[296] about further
parts, actually seen and destroyed by a more than Byzantine pudibundity,
are not taken as wholly gospel.

The completed _Fleur d'Epine_ and the uncompleted _Quatre
Facardins_[297] are in effect continuous parts (and to all appearance
incomplete in more than the finishing of the second story) of an
untitled but intelligibly sketched continuation of the _Arabian Nights_
themselves. Hamilton, like others since, had evidently conceived an
affection for Dinarzade: and a considerable contempt for Schahriar's
notion of the advantages of matrimony. It is less certain, but I think
possible, that he had anticipated the ideas of those who think that the
unmarried sister went at least halves in the composition or remembrance
of the stories themselves, or she could not have varied her timing at
dawn so adroitly. He had, at any rate, an Irish-Englishman's sense of
honest if humorous indignation at the part which she has to play (or
rather endure) in these "two years" (much nearer three!), and the sequel
in a way revenges her.

I should imagine that Thackeray must have been reminiscent of Hamilton
when he devised the part of "Sister Anne" in _Bluebeard's Ghost_. Like
her, Hamilton's Dinarzade is slightly flippant; she would most certainly
have observed "Dolly Codlins is the matter" in Anne's place. Like her,
she is not unprovided with lovers; she actually, at the beginning,
"takes a night off" that she may entertain the Prince of Trebizond; and
it is