PROBLEMS OF _ ENGLISH LITERARY HISTORY 421 



August 23, 25, 1714), Young's Busiris (1719), Hughes's Siege of 

 Damascus, just mentioned (1726), Lillo's Christian Hero (1735), and 

 Mallet's Mustapha (1759), are the last stragglers. In France the 

 enchanted world of the Arabian Nights had already in 1675 made 

 its first entrance through de la Croix's specimens of translation, and 

 in Galland's classical rendering of Les mille et une nuits (1704-17), 

 a repertory of inexhaustible riches for Oriental subjects was disclosed 

 which was to become of great and fruitful significance for the de- 

 velopment of romanticism. Montesquieu in his Lettres Persanes 

 (1721), on the other hand, and Voltaire in his Eastern dramas and 

 novels (1732-48) opened a new epoch in the application of Oriental 

 themes by making them the background of their rationalistic philo- 

 sophical speculations, a movement which attained its climax and 

 conclusion in Germany with Lcssing's Nathan der Weise (1779). 



Both currents reached England comparatively late. The rational- 

 istic bent has sporadic representatives in Johnson's Rasselas (1759) 

 and in Horace Walpole's anonymous squib, A Letter from Xo Ho, 

 a Chinese Philosopher in London, to his friend Lien Chi, at Peking 

 (1757), \vhich \vas written in the manner of Montesquieu's Lettres 

 Persanes, and in its turn gave rise to Goldsmith's kindred Chinese 

 Letters (1760), reprinted, in 1762, as The Citizen of the World. The 

 Arabian Nights, on the other hand, though fecommended to the 

 British public, in Galland's translation, by Addison in the Spectator 

 (no. 535, Nov. 13. 1712), had hardly any noticeable influence until 

 after 1760, when it gradually became an important element in the 

 development of the new romantic movement. Beckford's Vathek 

 (1786), so highly admired by Byron, is its first lineal descendant in 

 English literature. 



In the mean time an entirely new departure in the Eastern in- 

 fluences affecting European literature was initiated by the final 

 conquest and opening up of India through the English in the times 

 of Lord Clive and Warren Hastings. To the ancients and in the Mid- 

 dle Ages the eastern border of the world had been the mysterious 

 home of wonders and monstrosities, and their conception of it had 

 been greatly colored by Christian ideas throughout medieval times; 

 in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the countries of the 

 Mast had been haunted and partly conquered by adventurous con- 

 quistadores in search of gold and riches: the eighteenth century 

 had viewed the Orient through the spectacles of deism and rational- 

 ism: it was now for the first time that a really scientific investiga- 

 tion of the literatures, languages, laws, institutions, and manners 

 of the Oriental peoples was begun. 



Of important significance in this respect was the restless activity 

 of Sir William Jones (1746-94), who, in 1772, published a volume of 

 Poems containing translations and adaptations of Arabian, Persian. 



