After that winter in Algiers I never saw Burton again. He died a few months afterwards and was buried at Mortlake; where with my friend, Mr. Edmund Gosse, I visited his tomb last year. He lies buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery, and his monument is in the shape of an Arab tent which was raised to his memory by his friends. His wife is buried beside him. It is difficult to give an estimate of Burton’s character; it was a network of contradictions; even physically, with the torso of a Hercules and the hands of a young girl, he was a contradiction. Much that he wrote should never have been written; there is no need to specify; at the same time I believe, having good warranty for the belief, that his life was morally without stain; he was a model husband, and his wife adored him; he would proclaim himself an Agnostic, and he died in the odour of sanctity under the protection of the Roman Catholic Church, the confession to which his wife belonged; he wished to be considered a savage, and he was one of the most tender-hearted of men. He was kindness itself, and to his friends loving, faithful and generous in good service; but how angry he would have been if one of those friends had dared to accuse him of amiability! They would have been pulling down the whole structure which he had been at such pains to build up,—they would have been frustrating his lifelong endeavours to prove himself beyond the pale. Only with those who did not know him did he succeed in keeping up the imposture. In spite of his marvellous talents and knowledge he did not achieve a literary success; nobody could say that Burton was not a scholar in many tongues; yet strange to say, his books lacked the quality of scholarship and his English was poor. His talk, on the other hand, infinitely superior to his writing, was learned, various and good to listen to. He was an amazing companion. Of all his many books, only the translation of the “Arabian Nights” achieved fame and brought in money. For that there were adequate if not altogether blameless reasons. As a human document the book will live. * * * * * Once again, more than twenty years later, I was at Damascus. But what a change those two decades had wrought! Over the old city, which, when I first knew it, had kept through the centuries so much of the glamour of the Biblical and Medieval East, the Philistines had passed the levelling steam-roller of the nineteenth century. Turbans and flowing robes had disappeared, swept into rag and bone shops. Yellow and scarlet slippers had been discarded in favour of infidel patent leather boots with side springs.