416 ENGLISH LITERATURE 



poet, there remain a great many questions unanswered, and new 

 ones crop up continuously that demand an earnest consideration. I 

 am not thinking of the famous Shakespeare-Bacon squabble, which is 

 nothing but a literary farce. Originated in the land of humbug, and 

 eagerly adopted by would-be scholars in the land of mists and in the 

 land of dreamers, it is still carried on by a set of people who may. 

 on the whole, be characterized either as amateurs with an enviable 

 superfluity of leisure ; as hysteric women with a sense for the mysteri- 

 ous; or as cranks, or as swindlers. It would be an encroachment 

 upon the reader's time to enter once more into a discussion of this 

 literary sea-serpent. But the origin of the Hamlet drama, the rainbow 

 character of its hero, the relation of the two Quartos to one another, 

 the personal allusions in the Sonnets these and many others are 

 questions which still excite, and may Well excite, the curiosity and 

 sagacity of men of letters, and which continue to provoke new 

 attempts at explanation. 



Yet it is none of these much mooted problems that forms the sub- 

 ject of my present paper. I rather beg leave to direct my readers' 

 attention to a few less known tasks, the handling of which appears 

 to me to be a thing of urgent necessity. 



An important problem of this kind is a pragmatic history of 

 Oriental subjects in English literature. To point out the historical 

 facts which, in their turn, caused the ever-renewed interest of the 

 Occidental world in the Orient, the literary subjects which at different 

 times found their way into the European literatures, their significance 

 for the development of p]nglish poetry especially, and the numberless 

 channels and rills and veins through which they were spread, and 

 separated, and interwoven, and handed down from generation to 

 generation: such would be the task of the future historian who <lare.< 

 grapple with this difficult problem. 



I venture a few unpretending suggestions as to the general history 

 of those Oriental influences in English literature. 



The Bible, and especially the Old Testament, has always directed 

 the interest of the Christian nations to the Orient. It was indorsed 

 by influences of classical literature. Earlier than to other countries 

 of the West, the Alexander saga found its way to England, where as 

 early as the eleventh century we meet with translations of the Latin 

 Epistle of Alexander to Aristotle and DC rebus in Ori<nte mirabilibnx. 

 containing miraculous descriptions of the Orient and of that land of 

 wonders. India. To the same period belongs the Old English adapt- 

 ation of the late Greek novel of Apollonius of Tyre, from a Latin 

 version. The stories of .sea-voyages, .storms, pirates, and adventure.- 

 which occur in this novel seem to have rendered it particularly con- 

 genial to the Anglo-Saxon reader. 



