PROBLEMS OF ENGLISH LITERARY HISTORY 423 



Wordsworth and Keats. The Peninsular War occasioned no less 

 than three poems dealing with the conquest of Spain by the Moors: 

 Scott's Vision of Don Roderick (1811), Landor's Count Julian (1812), 

 and Southey's Roderick, the last of the Goths (1814). In 1810 Southey 

 published his Hindoo tale, The Curse of Kehama; from 1813-1816 

 Byron poured forth in rapid succession his series of Oriental epics (The 

 Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The Siege of Corinth), 

 which were devoured with delight by his compatriots; but by far 

 the finest sketches that Byron has given us of Oriental life and 

 characters are to be found in his Don Juan and Sardanapalus: a 

 figure like that of Haidee is so intensely Oriental in all her passionate 

 love and tender sensuousness that it has no equal in the Oriental 

 tales of English literature. 



Moore followed the example given by Byron in his Eastern epics ; 

 Lalla Rookh (1817) is one of the most perfect attempts at imitating 

 the style and atmosphere of genuine Oriental poetry. Shelley, too, 

 did homage to the Orient in Alastor (1816) and the Revolt of Islam 

 (1818). Of Walter Scott's novels the two "Tales of the Crusaders," 

 (The Betrothed and The Talisman, 1825), The Surgeon's Daughter 

 (1827), and Count Robert of Paris (1832), belong to our province. 

 One of the most brilliant specimens of Orientalism in the English 

 literature of this period is James Morier's Hajji Baba of Ispahan, 

 which beats Vathek in the fidelity of its descriptions and the vivacity 

 of its narrative, and has become one of the classical books of Eng- 

 lish literature. 



Of the poets of the Victorian era, Tennyson borrowed the idea 

 of his Locksley Hall from Sir William Jones's English translation of 

 the Arabian Moallakat, and according to an acute observation by 

 Koeppel, even the solemn, majestically broad-flowing meter was 

 suggested by the cadence of the Arabian original as he read it in 

 Sir William Jones's translation. From the same current which caused 

 Goethe, Schlegel, Riickert, and Bodenstedt to study Oriental litera- 

 ture, sprang Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum (1853), and the 

 free adaptation of the Rubaiyat from the Persian of Omar Khayyam, 

 by Tennyson's friend Edward FitzGerald (1859), which in its turn 

 exercised considerable influence on the pre-Raphaelites and younger 

 bards, and is an abiding stimulus to the study and translation of 

 other Persian poets. Sir Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia, too, is an 

 outcome of the same movement. Of American authors Emerson 

 and Thoreau were deeply impressed by Oriental philosophy and 

 We Itan schauung. 



All these literary works belong to the period that was initiated 

 by the English conquest of India and which may be termed the 

 period of learned study of Oriental languages, literatures, and institu- 

 tions. Rudyard Kipling's Indian tales, with their descriptions mostly 



