Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 6 (of 6)
General
Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 6 (of 6)
Fairy tales; Tales -- Arab countries
And the same is the case with the St. Louis Post Dispatch (November 11, '85)
the Mail Express of New York (November 23,'85); the Weekly Post of Boston
(November 27 '85), which again revives a false report, and with the Boston
Herald (December 16,'85). The Chicago Daily News (January 30, '86) contains a
malicious sneer at the Kamashastra Society. The American Register (Paris, July
25, '86) informs its clientèle, "If, as is generally supposed, Captain
Burton's book is printed abroad, the probability is that every copy will on
arrival be confiscated as 'indecent' by the Custom-house." And to curtail a
long list of similar fadaises I will quote the Bookmart (of Pittsburg, Pa.,
U.S.A., October, '86): "Sir Richard Burton's 'Nights' are terribly in want of
the fig-leaf, if anything less than a cabbage leaf will do, before they can be
fit (fitted?) for family reading. It is not possible (Is it not possible?)
that by the time a household selection has been sifted out of the great work,
everything which makes the originality and the value--such as it is--of
Richard's series of volumes will have disappeared, and nothing will remain but
his diverting lunacies of style." The Bookmart, I am informed, is edited by
one Halkett Lord, an unnaturalised Englishman who finds it pays best to abuse
everything and everyone English. And lastly, the Springfield Republican (April
5, '88) assures me that I have published "fully as much as the (his?) world
wants of the 'Nights'."
In the case of "The Nights," I am exposed to that peculiar Protestant form of
hypocrisy, so different from the Tartuffean original of Catholicism, and still
as mighty a motor force, throughout the length and breadth of the
North-American continent, as within the narrow limits of England. There also
as here it goes hand-in-hand with "Respectability" to blind judgment and good
sense.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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