John Payne and Burton collaborated on their respective translations of the "Nights" for more than half a decade, and each respected the other's scholarship, but Payne believed that Burton had plagiarised his manuscripts when he sent them to Trieste to be checked. In 1906, a biographer of Burton, Thomas Wright, made the claim that Burton had plagiarised most of his translation from Payne. Burton's most recent biographer summarises the situation as follows.He made a comparison of the respective versions of the "Nights" by Burton and Payne. We know, not only from Richard's and Isabel's writings but from the statements of people who met him through the years, that Burton had been collecting manuscripts of the "Nights" stories and translating them, on and off, for over twenty-five years before he met Payne. So Wright's claim that Burton had not done his own translation, but had "taken from Payne at least three-quarters of his entire work", is extraordinary.