their influence was felt. The crusades made the Europeans intimately
acquainted with the literature of the Arabs. Says Marton, who maintains
that romantic fiction originated in Arabia, in his "History of English
Poetry," "Amid the gloom of superstition, in an age of the grossest
ignorance and credulity, a taste for the wonders of oriental fiction was
introduced by the Arabians into Europe, many countries of which were
already seasoned to a reception of its extravagancies by means of the
poetry of the Gothic scalds, who, perhaps, originally derived their
ideas from the same fruitful region of invention.

"These fictions coinciding with the reigning manners, and perpetually
kept up and improved in the tales of troubadours and minstrels, seem to
have centred about the eleventh century in the ideal histories of Turpin
and Geoffrey of Monmouth, which record the suppositious achievements of
Charlemagne and King Arthur, where they formed the groundwork of that
species of narrative called romance. And from these beginnings or
causes, afterwards enlarged and enriched by kindred fancies fetched from
the crusades, that singular and capricious mode of imagination arose,
which at length composed the marvellous machineries of the more sublime
Italian poets, and of their disciple Spenser." The theory which traces
romantic fiction to the Arabs is but partially true. The entire
literature of that age was monstrous, full of the most absurd and
extravagant fancies. History was fabulous; poetry mendacious and
philosophy erroneous. Theology abounded in pious frauds. Monks and
minstrels vied with each other in the invention of lying legends to
adorn the lives of heroes and saints. All classes of the community
shared in the general delusion, and the supernatural seemed more
credible than the natural. In tracing the progress of learning, in
England, I propose, during the remainder of the present paper to discuss
one inconsiderable yet _important_ element of modern civilization,