his mistake, on the chance that such spectator might betray him. The argument remains to afford food for contest, but the story on which it is founded has vanished into nothingness. For Captain Burton has assured the City and the world, in a note to one of the recent volumes of his 'Arabian Nights,' that the whole thing is fiction, a canard, a literary wild duck of the wildest. "Meccah, and the record of the pilgrimage thereto, would haw been venture enough and renown enough for an ordinary lifetime. It is merely an episode in the active and literary career of Captain Burton. Into the generation that has come and gone since the Sheikh Abdullah shook the dust of Meccah from off the soles of his sacrilegious feet, where has Burton not been and what has he not done? He has gone hither and thither 'like the wind's blast, never resting, homeless'--now to the Land of Midian, now to the Gold Coast for gold, now dwelling in Damascus, now in the dim and dangerous Cameroons, now in Trieste, and now in Marocco. With all this, as if possessed by a very demon of work, he has found time to store his brain with a most marvellous multiplicity of learning, and to write a very Alexandrian library of books on all manner of strange and widely differing subjects. Every one of his travels has been made the theme for a long, but never too long, record. He has translated the lengthy 'Lusiads' of Camoens with the same lightness of heart with which most men would sit down to scratch off a leading article. He has given the world that monument of fascinating knowledge on a fascinating subject, 'The Book of the Sword,' to which the erudition and research of a long lifetime might well appear to have been devoted. He has imported grotesque devil tales from Hindostan. He has written under the thin disguise of a Persian bard--a disguise as thin as that of Bodensted's 'Mirza Shaffy'--a wonderful poem which speculates upon the life of man in something of the spirit of Fitzgerald's 'Omar Khayyam.' He has translated, for the benefit of the curious and initiated few, a Hindoo work on 'Martial Relationships,' which is one of the eccentricities of literature. Now, in what would be called, were he any one else but Richard Burton, his old age, he is bringing out his great translation of the 'Arabian Nights,' one of the most valuable contributions that have ever been made to the literature of Oriental investigation.