The Life of John Payne. By Thomas Wright. (T. Fisher
Unwin. 28e, net.)—Mr. Payne, who died in 1916 at the age of seventy-four, is remembered as a competent and indefatigable transiatorand. as a poet with taste and_seholarship. Mr. Wright has written his biography in much detail, and with a certain animus• against the literary public for having taken. too little notice. of the poet-translator while he lived. Payne's chief work was. a, vereipn of The Arabian; .Nights. According to Mr. Wright, " Burton's version was in the earlier portion largely-a paraphrase. of Paynes,,and in the latter simply Payne's. altered and spoilt." Payne, we, are told, did his work on the. top of an omnibus. We seem to. have heard. that a well-known modern epic was written in the old and dreadful Underground Railway; so that Mr. Wright may not • be romancing on this point. Payne also translated Villon, Bandello,. Boccaccio's Decaineron, Hafiz, as well as Omar Khayyam, who in his hands, we must add, became, intolerable. Mr. Wright, working from an unpublished autobiography, gives: an interesting account of Payne's friendships in the "sixties" and- "-seventies," especially of the Rossetti and Madox Brown circle.
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