Page:The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, Vol 9.djvu/412

378 of Boccaccio, or (as in Kafour and ) the cudgel-strokes of drollery, half naïve, half caustic, of Sancho or Sganarelle, or (as in ) the deliberate wit of the Moyen de Parvenir, it is always apt and always effective, in utrumque paratus, equally at home with the rough and ready weapons of popular repartee and the more keenly attempered arms of satire and word-fence. The whole Oriental world of the Khalifate re-lives for us in these enchanted pages, from which nothing is rejected, nothing excluded as common or unclean, and in which all classes of the Muslim world are represented, king and slave, courtier and countryman, pietist and freethinker, learned and ignorant, wise and foolish, moralist and debauchee. Satire and sentiment, love and lewdness, wit and wisdom, holiness and hypocrisy, chase each other through the shifting scenes of this magic lantern of the East, in which the pure and self-sacrificing tenderness of an Azizeh “sticks fiery off indeed” from the selfish sensuality of her rivals, and the strains of exalted morality and passionate devoutness, the traits of heroic faith and unwearying magnanimity, that jostle with the satyr-orgies of an Abou Nuwas and the fiendish treachery of an Aboukir, show but the goodlier for the blackness of the baseness that encompasses them.

One of the chief stumbling-blocks in the path of a translator of the Thousand and One Nights is the peculiar shapelessness of Arabic prose. Without stops, capitals or other indications of breach of continuity and