Lord Stratford De Redcliffe and Mr. S. Lane-Poole.
London, Aug. 26, 1888.
Will you kindly spare me space for a few lines touching matters
personal?
I am again the victim (Athenæum, August 25) of that everlasting
réclame. Mr. S. Lane-Poole has contracted to "do" a life of Lord
Stratford, and, ergo, he condemns me in magistral tone and a
style of uncalled-for impertinence, to act as his "advt." In
relating how, by order of the late General Beatson, then
commanding Bash-buzuk (Bashi-bazuk is the advertiser's own
property), I volunteered to relieve Cars, how I laid the project
before the "Great Eltchee," how it was received with the roughest
language and how my first plan was thoroughly "frustrated." I
have told a true tale, and no more. "A strange perversion of
facts," cries the sapient criticaster, with that normal amenity
which has won for him such honour and troops of unfriends: when
his name was proposed as secretary to the R. A. S., all
prophesied the speediest dissolution of that infirm body.
I am aware that Constantinople is not geographically "out of
Europe." But when Mr. S. Lane-Poole shall have travelled a trifle
more he may learn that ethnologically it is. In fact, most of
South-Eastern Europe holds itself more or less non-European, and
when a Montenegrin marries a Frenchwoman or a German, his family
will tell you that he has wedded a "European."
"No one knows better than Sir R. Burton by what queer methods
reputation may be annexed." Heavens, what English! And what may
the man mean? But perhaps he alludes in his own silly, saltless,
sneering way to my Thousand Nights and a Night, which has shown
what the "Uncle and Master's" work should have been. Some two
generations of poules mouillées have reprinted and republished
Lane's "Arabian Notes" without having the simple honesty to
correct a single bévue, or to abate one blunder; while they
looked upon the Arabian Nights as their own especial rotten
borough. But more of this in my tractate, "The Reviewer
Reviewed," about to be printed as an appendix to my Supplemental
Volume, No. vi.
Richard F. Burton.