islands of the South Sea as it was to the Middle Ages and the manners of
Scotch Highlanders. The sensitiveness to the picturesque, the liking for
local color and for whatever is striking, characteristic, and peculiarly
national in foreign ways is a romantic note. The eighteenth century
disliked "strangeness added to beauty"; it disapproved of anything
original, exotic, tropical, bizarre for the same reason that it
disapproved of mountains and Gothic architecture.

Professor Gates says that the work of English literature during the first
quarter of the present century was "the rediscovery and vindication of
the concrete. The special task of the eighteenth century had been to
order, and to systematize, and to name; its favorite methods had been
analysis and generalization. It asked for no new experience. . . The
abstract, the typical, the general--these were everywhere exalted at the
expense of the image, the specific experience, the vital fact."[14]
Classical tragedy, _e.g._, undertook to present only the universal,
abstract, permanent truths of human character and passion.[15] The
impression of the mysterious East upon modern travelers and poets like
Byron, Southey, De Quincey, Moore, Hugo,[16] Ruckert, and Gérard de
Nerval, has no counterpart in the eighteenth century. The Oriental
allegory or moral apologue, as practiced by Addison in such papers as
"The Vision of Mirza," and by Johnson in "Rasselas," is rather faintly
colored and gets what color it has from the Old Testament. It is
significant that the romantic Collins endeavored to give a novel turn to
the decayed pastoral by writing a number of "Oriental Eclogues," in which
dervishes and camel-drivers took the place of shepherds, but the
experiment was not a lucky one. Milton had more of the East in his
imagination than any of his successors. His "vulture on Imaus bred,
whose snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds"; his "plain of Sericana where
Chinese drive their cany wagons light"; his "utmost Indian isle