The actual moment is an opportune one for the reappearance of the work. Egypt just now holds a foremost place in the eyes of the world, and it is of Egypt that the _Thousand and One Nights_ have most to tell. Indian or Persian as many of the tales are in their origin, their setting is almost purely Egyptian; and though the place may be nominally Baghdád or India, or even furthest China, it is in mediæval Cairo, in the days of the Memlooks, that the scene of the Arabian Nights is really laid. The people described are not Hindoos or Chinese, but Arabs and Egyptians as they lived and moved in the fifteenth century, when some of the beautiful mosques and tombs, that still make Cairo the delight of artists, were being built, and the devastating hand of the Ottoman Turk had not yet been laid on the land of the Pharaohs. For a minute picture of Arabian society as it was in the Middle Ages, the _Thousand and One Nights_ have no rival, and it is Mr. Lane's appreciation of this picture, and the wealth of illustration lavished upon it in his Notes, that render his edition the most complete commentary we possess on Muslim life and manners, religion and literature, and make it an indispensable supplement to his famous _Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians_. The poetry of Eastern life is rapidly fading away under the effacing touch of European civilisation; the characteristic society in which an Haroon-Er-Rasheed, an Aboo-Nuwas, a Káfoor, a Saladin, or a Kaït-Bey, revelled and jested and conquered, is fast becoming matter of history rather than of experience, a field for the antiquary instead of the traveller; and it is well that we can reconstruct it in the pages of the _Thousand and One Nights_, whose compiler saw it when it was still almost in its Golden Prime, and in the _Modern Egyptians_, whose author knew it when it still preserved the romantic character which has charmed and fascinated readers of every age and condition. STANLEY LANE-POOLE. THE DAY OF TELL-EL-KEBEER, 1882. [Illustration] THE EDITOR'S PREFACE.