SOURCE: Brown, Wallace Cable. “Thomas Moore and English Interest in the East.” Studies in Philology, XXXIV, no. 4 (October 1937): 576-88.

[In the following essay, Brown offers a detailed examination of Moore's Eastern sources for Lalla Rookh, The Loves of the Angels, and The Epicurean, arguing that although Moore's use of Eastern materials was primarily ornamental, his details and references are based in fact and the result of extensive studies of oriental source materials.]

When Byron advised Thomas Moore to “stick to the East” as “the only poetical policy,” both writers were responding to the interest in that region which, popularized by dozens of travel books, flourished in England in the early nineteenth century.¹ Other writers whose works include literary manifestations of this interest in the East are Robert Southey, numerous minor versifiers, and the traveller-novelists Thomas Hope and James Morier.² Like Southey, Moore never visited the East, but like Byron, Hope, and Morier, who did, he was intensely interested in that region per se. To show the nature, extent, and contemporary reception of Moore's use of eastern materials is the purpose of the present paper.

I

Moore's first determination to write an oriental poem, at the suggestion of Samuel Rogers and other friends, antedates anything that Byron published about the East; although of course his intention to do so came long after Southey's Thalaba had appeared in 1801. In September, 1811, Moore wrote to Mary Godfrey:

I shall now take to my poem, and do something, I hope, that will place me above the vulgar herd both of worldlings and of critics; but you shall hear from me again, when I get among the maids of Cashmere, the sparkling springs of Rochabad, and the fragrant banquets of the Peris.³

And Rogers wrote to Moore in the same month:

What have you done? Is the dramatic concluded and the epic begun? Are you now in a pavilion on the banks of the Tigris? Or, in the shape of a nightingale, singing love-songs to a Rose in the gardens of Cashmere?⁴

At that time Byron was revising the first two cantos of Childe Harold, which however were not published till the following March. But Byron's star had flamed to its spectacular heights, and fallen, before Lalla Rookh was in print five years later.

Moore's persistence despite the numerous misfortunes which attended the composition of Lalla Rookh, including his discomfiture at being anticipated by Byron in the Turkish tales, shows his confidence in the depth and popularity of English interest in the East—a confidence that was not misplaced. In 1813 Byron wrote to Moore announcing his plan for a poem about the love of a Peri and a mortal. As we know from the second part of Lalla Rookh, Moore had already made the daughter of a Peri the heroine of one of his own tales. He answered Byron at once, asking only to be warned of the latter's plans; Byron immediately dropped his design for the poem about the Peri. But he then went to work on The Bride of Abydos, which, when published, forced Moore to give up one of the stories he had planned for Lalla Rookh because of coincidences “not only in the locality and costume, but in plot and characters,” between it and The Bride.⁵

In spite of these difficulties, Lalla Rookh, when finally published in 1817, was instantly and widely popular; and commanded a price equal to the highest ever paid in England for a literary copyright—three thousand guineas. By 1841 the poem had gone through twenty editions, of which six appeared in the first year of publication;⁶ and Moore was able, in his own edition of his poetry, to look back with somewhat smug satisfaction on the long success of Lalla Rookh.⁷ Thus the poem's reception strongly confirmed Byron's opinion about English interest in the East, as expressed to Moore in 1813:

Stick to the East;—the oracle, Stael, told me it was the only poetical policy. The North, South, and West have all been exhausted; but from the East we have nothing. …⁸

In form Lalla Rookh is an imitation of the oriental “frame-tale,” in which several poems are loosely held together in a prose framework. In this instance, the prose connecting links tell the story of the journey of a beautiful princess of Delhi, Lalla Rookh, to meet her betrothed, the young king of Bucharia, in the valley of Cashmere. To entertain the royal lady on her journey, her fiancé sends a young Cashmerian poet, Feramorz, who recites the four tales which comprise the main body of the poem. In the end Feramorz, with whom Lalla Rookh has fallen in love, turns out to be her intended husband in disguise.

II

Lalla Rookh, like Southey's Thalaba, is copiously annotated. Explanatory and illustrative notes from Moore's wide reading in eastern source materials abound on almost every page. These materials derive from more than eighty separate works, including encyclopedias, dictionaries, histories, English, French, and German travel books, translations from oriental literature, and scholarly essays on oriental subjects.⁹ Moore himself sums up this research as follows:

… my own chief work of fiction [Lalla Rookh] is founded on a long and laborious collection of facts. All the customs, the scenery, every flower from which I have drawn an illustration, were inquired into by me with the utmost accuracy; and I left no book that I could find on the subject unransacked. Hence arises that matter-of-fact adherence to Orientalism for which Sir Gore Ouseley, Colonel Wilks, Carne, and others, have given me credit.¹⁰

And Rogers, writing to Moore in 1812, bears testimony to the thoroughness of these investigations: “To tell you the truth, I had no conception that any body in so short a time could have so imbued his mind with Eastern literature.”¹¹ Finally, in his diary Moore records, with evident satisfaction, many compliments by orientals on the fidelity of his manners and descriptions in Lalla Rookh.¹²

In addition to his extensive researches, Moore attempted to increase the accuracy of his eastern writings by contacts with people who had travelled there. Byron the traveller, of course, he knew intimately; Hobhouse, casually; and in his journal and diary are often mentioned visits with “Dr. Holland, the Albanian traveller,”¹³ Captain Thomas Leigh, James Morier, George Keppel, William Bankes, William M. Leake, and the Frenchman Denon—all travellers and the authors of Near East travel books.¹⁴ It is significant in this connection that far from believing his not having seen the East a handicap in writing about it, Moore considered this fact a distinct advantage! Note his report of a conversation with Denon:

In talking of Savary's never having been further than Cairo, he [Denon] said Savary had that kind of imagination which is chilled by the real scene, and can best describe what it has not seen, merely taking it from the descriptions of others. This is very much the case with myself.¹⁵

The nature of Moore's use of the source material that figured so importantly in the composition of Lalla Rookh may be judged from a typical example. In a passage, taken almost at random from “The Fire-worshippers,” Hinda, the beautiful daughter of the Mohammedan Arab who has enslaved Persia, has been captured by Hafed, leader of the Persian Fire-worshippers, a small band of patriots struggling to free their country. Hinda and Hafed are of course deeply and fatally in love; so the motif of love versus patriotism is developed, and Hinda's position becomes indeed precarious:

Blest Allah! who shall save her now?
          There's not in all that warrior band
One Arab sword, one turban'd brow
          From her own Faithful Moslem land.
Their garb—the leathern belt that wraps
          Each yellow vest—that rebel hue—
The Tartar fleece upon their caps—
          Yes—Yes—her fears are all too true,
And Heav'n hath, in this dreadful hour,
Abandon'd her to Hafed's power …(16)

In footnotes to this passage, Moore refers the reader to an article in D'Herbelot's Bibliothèque Orientale concerning the “leathern belt” worn by the Persians as a distinctive racial mark. He quotes from Thevenot's travel books to substantiate the reference to the yellow vest, “that rebel hue,” and from Waring's Tour to Sheeraz to illustrate the use of “the Tartar fleece upon their caps.”¹⁷ This procedure is characteristic: the eastern source materials are used to verify or illustrate the manners, customs, or scenic descriptions in the poem.

Although relatively successful in imparting an oriental tone to his descriptions, Moore faced a much harder problem in orientalizing the dominant ideas in his poem. After repeated attempts he gave up, and solved the problem on purely occidental lines:

Had this series of disheartening experiments been carried on much further, I must have thrown aside the work in despair. But, at last … the thought occurred to me of founding a story on the fierce struggle so long maintained between the Ghebers, or ancient Fire-worshippers of Persia, and their haughty Moslem masters. From that moment, a new and deep interest in my whole task took possession of me. The cause of tolerance was again my inspiring theme; and the spirit that had spoken in the melodies of Ireland soon found itself at home in the East.¹⁸

And in the next paragraph of this Preface Moore says specifically that his reading in eastern source materials was intended to provide him not with a truly oriental subject, but with the machinery for placing an essentially occidental theme (“the cause of tolerance”) in a Near East setting.¹⁹ It is significant to note here that Moore is most successful (in “The Fire-worshippers”) when he is dealing with the “inspiring theme” of liberty which he had already treated in the Irish Melodies.

III

Contemporary reviews of Lalla Rookh provide a reliable cross-section of public opinion about it, and clearly indicate the nature and extent of English interest in the East. Despite the popularity of the poem and the generous praise accorded it, that praise was by no means uncritical. Thus the Edinburgh Review finds an excess of the sensuous imagery that was characteristic of the English oriental poetry of the period:

… the effect of the whole is to mingle a certain feeling a disappointment with that of admiration … to dazzle, more than to enchant—and, in the end, more frequently to startle the fancy, and fatigue the attention, with the constant succession of glittering images and high-strained emotions, than to maintain a rising interest, or win a growing sympathy, by a less profuse or more systematic display of attractions.²⁰

Other magazines voice similar criticisms: the Eclectic Review, for example, says: “the style which Mr. Moore has chosen, is that which beyond any other is liable to cloy”;²¹ and the British Review declares that, after reading Lalla Rookh, the reader longs for a garden of leeks and onions to relieve the senses and to avoid dying “of a rose in aromatic pain.”²²

The vogue for eastern poetry, as epitomized in Lalla Rookh, receives another significant interpretation in the British Review. The critic insists that the great wave of interest in the orient has tended to make indigenous poetic materials look pale by contrast: the poet cannot let his imagination run riot about English heroines and settings; so he transports her to the East in order to give his luxuriant fancy free play. The reviewer concludes that Byron is mainly responsible for this widespread interest in the orient; and he deplores both the migration of the English muse eastward and the tendency of popular taste to tolerate views of women and their position based on oriental ideas.²³ Here again the implication of a tremendous vogue for eastern poetry is unmistakable.

Another criticism of Lalla Rookh implies, on the part of the British reading public, a knowledge of the East which only travel books could give. The criticism is that the poem misrepresents actual eastern life by presenting only one side of the picture. Thus the British Review maintains that where so much is made of “corporeal delights,” where the reader hears of nothing but “groves and baths and fountains, fruits and flowers, and sexual blandishments,” he is too likely to imagine “a paradise of sweets”; whereas the truth is that such delights are usually accompanied by

dirt and every disgusting impurity. … These miserable Turks and Greeks and Persians and Albanians make a figure only in the sickly pages of our epicurean poets; there is scarcely an individual among them whom an Englishman of cleanly habits could endure by his side.²⁴

This impartial picture of the Near East, in which both the attractive and the unattractive sides are given, is the one portrayed by the travellers. Moore, the poet, tended to take from his sources only those attractive and exotic elements; and his critics, by objecting to this procedure, indicate the English reader's awareness of both the sordid realism and the romance which lay in the Near East—an awareness that could come only through a wide acquaintance with travel literature.

Finally, according to another contemporary critic, Lalla Rookh represents the tendency for English poets to take their muse to exotic places in order to show off their learning in footnotes! This tendency the critic deplores; and adds that Moore's notes are a deadly load for his readers, one-half of whom already know the facts, and the other half neither need nor care to know them,²⁵ Here again appears an unmistakable reference to the popularity of Near East travel-book material.

Contemporary appreciation and praise of Lalla Rookh in newspapers and magazines are legion.²⁶ They range from the Monthly Magazine's extravagant eulogy of the author (“Now we hail the rising of a sun which will never set”)²⁷ to Blackwood's equally extravagant assertion that everything in the poem is truly oriental.²⁸ Between these extremes appear numerous favorable comments on the poem's intensity of feeling, delicacy of taste, command of imagery, and discrimination of character. But, whether favorable or not, these contemporary comments show the deep and wide-spread interest in the East, and give to Lalla Rookh an important place among the documents which manifest this interest.

IV

Apart from two minor prose tales, a few scattered lyrics, and the song sequence, “Evenings in Greece,” in which the primary interest is musical, Moore's only other works based on eastern materials are the poem, The Loves of the Angels (1823), and the prose romance, The Epicurean (1827). The former, an eastern allegory in octosyllabic stanzas, was originally begun as a prose story; just as, conversely, The Epicurean was first conceived as “a Romance in verse, in the form of Letters or Epistles.”²⁹ Although Moore insisted that the only source for his poem was “the eastern story of the Angels Harut and Marut, and the Rabbinical fictions of the loves of Uzziel and Shamchazai,”³⁰The Loves of the Angels was immediately associated with the text in Genesis (VI, 1-2) where the sons of God are said to fall in love with the daughters of men. As a result there was considerable objection to the poet's impious use of a biblical subject.³¹ When a fifth edition was called for, Moore met this criticism by “turning the poor ‘Angels’ into ‘Turks,’” and thus gave the poem a still more oriental cast.³²

The general setting of The Loves of the Angels is vaguely conceived in the orient. The author is no more specific in any of its details than in the following description of the place where the first angel saw and fell in love with one of the daughters of men:

'Twas in a land, that far away
          Into the golden orient lies,
Where Nature knows not night's delay,
But springs to meet her bridegroom, Day,
          Upon the threshold of the skies. …(33)

In the final, or orientalized, version of the poem, Moore carefully collected from his eastern authorities all the parallels with Christian theology that he could find, in order to change the original text as little as possible. And he avoided any direct biblical implication by using the term “Alla” instead of “God.” But the fact that Moore intended these “spirits” to be considered very similar to, if not identical with, Christian angels is apparent from the title of the poem and from the following comparison: the spirits who stand nearest Alla are,

Creatures of light, such as still play
          Like motes in sunshine, round the Lord,
And through their infinite array
Transmit each moment, night and day,
          The echo of His luminous word!(34)

Primarily, of course, Moore's purpose in The Loves of the Angels was simply to tell a dreamy romantic story. But hardly less apparent in the poem is his intention to praise the wholly occidental and Christian virtue of connubial love. The third, and originally greatest, angel is actually married to his mortal love; and the conclusion of the poem links the names of these two with all earthly lovers, and eulogizes the sanctity of married bliss:

Should we e'er meet with aught so pure,
So perfect here, we may be sure
          'Tis Zaraph and his bride we see;
And call young lovers round, to view
The pilgrim pair, as they pursue
          Their pathway tow'rds eternity.(35)

Moore's use of eastern materials in this poem is thus more superficial than his use of them in Lalla Rookh: even as decoration they are less germane to the subject. The expedient of making The Loves of the Angels more oriental in the fifth edition and the numerous parallels which the author points out, in his Preface and footnotes, between its story and Mohammedan, Persian, and Egyptian mythology, constitute the main eastern elements in the poem.

V

The Epicurean describes the spiritual evolution of Alciphron, a young Greek leader of the Epicureans at Athens in the reign of the Emperor Valerian. Doubting the principles of his philosophy, Alciphron goes to Egypt to find the answer to the mystery of life. At the “great festival of the Moon” in Memphis he sees a young priestess in one of the temples, with whom he falls violently in love. After a series of melodramatic adventures in great caverns beneath the pyramids, Alciphron is rescued by this same priestess, who turns out to be a Christian in disguise. In their subsequent adventures together, the young Greek is subjected to the strongest influences of Christianity, to which he is converted when his priestess-lover, Alethe, suffers martyrdom at the hands of Egyptian fanatics.

The author's main interest in this romance is the Christian pilgrimage and redemption of Alciphron, in the pursuit of which Moore distorts the Epicurean philosophy, grossly exaggerates the facts (as they were then known) about Egyptian religious rites, and in general pays little attention to probability throughout the story.³⁶ The result, apart from an undercurrent of sincere Christian proselytism, is a kind of gothic romance, in which distorted gloom and horror are made subservient to a highly fantastic sequence of events.

The Epicurean, like Moore's other eastern stories, is heavily weighted with footnote erudition, the reading for which he began at least seven years before the romance was finally published. Thus his diary for July 15, 1820, records: “Read Maillet, and the part of Antenor's travels relating to Egypt”;³⁷ and five days later:

Bought “Sethos,” an Egyptian romance; and have found a work by Chateaubriand, called “Les Martyrs,” which is very much in the same beat with my new story.³⁸

Numerous similar references to Moore's plans for The Epicurean appear during the next few years, including his “intention of turning my Egyptian story into a grand drama of show and scenery,” which he dropped because “neither the descent to the Souterrains nor the inundations would have been practicable.”³⁹ Among the better known English travellers whose books he uses are: Edward D. Clarke, James Bruce, William R. Hamilton, William G. Browne, Lord Valentia, Thomas Shaw, and Captain James Mangles.

All this eastern source material is, however, mainly decorative in The Epicurean; for Moore's primary interest is a kind of romantic ideology in which the hidden meanings of things are fascinating and vital and through which may come an abiding faith. For the author's purpose, therefore, any distant, and to him obscure, ritualistic material would have sufficed. He happened to have read widely about eastern ritual and myth in preparation for Lalla Rookh and The Loves of the Angels; so he appropriated some of this material for the “machinery” and setting in The Epicurean.

This particular kind of romantic interest in the ritualistic mysteries of the East is, among English writers (so far as I have been able to discover), peculiar to Moore. In the travel books the nearest approach to it appears in Clarke, who, romantic traveller though he was, dismissed the subject as follows:

The reader's curiosity to become acquainted with the hidden meaning of the symbols upon this obelisk [at Heliopolis] is perhaps quite equal to that of the author; and if all that Kircher has written for its illustration be adequate to this effect, nothing is easier than to transcribe his observations. But Isis long ago declared, that no mortal had ever removed her veil; and the impenetrable secret seems not likely to be divulged.⁴⁰

Undoubtedly Moore's perennial disquietude about religious beliefs had much to do with what he attempted in The Epicurean, for this problem engrosses him throughout his portrayal of the mysteries of Egyptian mythology.

The nature of Moore's use of eastern materials is, as I have shown, mainly decorative. The decoration, however, is accurately based on histories and travel books. But Moore admits in his notes to Lalla Rookh, and the fact is patent in his other eastern works, that in all of them he superimposed oriental machinery and description on essentially occidental ideas. This procedure is similar to that of Southey in Thalaba, with one important difference: Moore was genuinely interested in and sympathetic with his sources, whereas Southey was not.⁴¹

Moore's use of oriental materials extends through some of his best-known work. Like Byron, he owed to his eastern poetry his greatest contemporary popularity; although in a familiar comment he admitted that Lalla Rookh, as poetry, was inferior to the Irish Melodies.⁴² Sensing the popularity of English interest in the orient, Moore, again like Byron, resolved to “stick to the East” as “the only poetical policy”; and this resolution succeeded beyond expectation.

In Lalla Rookh, The Loves of the Angels, and The Epicurean Moore identifies himself with that group of English writers who, beginning with William Beckford (Vathek, 1786), created oriental atmosphere in their work by the introduction of picturesque detail about the East,⁴³ the chief source for which were the travel books and the personal observation of travellers. Besides Beckford and Moore, this group includes, most importantly, Southey, Byron, and the novelists Hope and Morier. The success of their work provides a brilliant literary manifestation of the contemporary popularity of English interest in the East.

Notes

1. See my article, “The Popularity of English Travel Books about the Near East, 1775-1825,” PQ [Philological Quarterly], XV (1936), 70-80.

2. I am preparing a series of articles on the relationship between these writers and English interest in the East, of which the following have been completed: “Byron and English Interest in the Near East,” SP [Studies in Philology], XXXIV (1937), 55-64; “English Travel Books and Minor Poetry about the Near East, 1775-1825,” PQ, XVI (1937), 249-271; and “Prose Fiction and English Interest in the Near East, 1775-1825,” to appear in PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] in March, 1938.

3. Lord John Russell, ed., The Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore (London, 1853-6), VIII, 92-3.

4. Ibid., VIII, 94-5.

5. See Stephen Gwynn's account of this whole matter in his not very sympathetic or satisfactory Thomas Moore, EML [English Men of Letters Series] (London, 1905), pp. 58-61. Cf. also Moore's own complaints: “Never was anything more unlucky for me than Byron's invasion of this region, which when I entered it, was as yet untrodden; and whose chief charm consisted in the gloss and novelty of its features”: Russell, op. cit., VIII, 134; and see ibid., I, 349 and VIII, 205.

6. See Russell, op. cit., VIII, 229: by 1821 Lalla Rookh had also “appeared in the French, Italian, German, and Persian languages.” Ibid., III, 218-9.

7. See Thomas Moore, ed., The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London, 1840-1), VI, 1-16.

8. R. E. Prothero, ed., The Works of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals (London, 1904), II, 255.

9. Following are some of the better known authors and titles that Moore used: D'Herbelot's Bibliothèque Orientale, Dow's History of Hindostan, Malcolm's History of Persia, Castellan's Moeurs des Othomans; Near East travel books by Bernier, Chardin, Thevenot, Savary, Tournefort, Sonnini, Baumgarten, Maundrell, Shaw, Bruce, Waring, Morier, Fryer, and Niebuhr; Jonathan Scott's translation of the Barhar-Danush and Champion's translation of Ferdusi; essays from Asiatic Researches and Persian Miscellanies, and both essays and translations by Sir William Jones.

10. Russell, op. cit., VII, 255-6; cf. the following comment by Lord John Russell: “No man knew better [than Moore] how to turn his researches in libraries to account, and to pick out the jewels from the stone and rubbish of the mine in which he was employed”; Ibid., VI, 17; and another statement by Moore himself:

    I took the whole range of all such Oriental reading as was accessible to me; and became, for the time, indeed, far more conversant with all relating to that distant region, than I have ever been with the scenery, productions, or modes of life of any of those countries lying most within my reach. Moore, op. cit., VI, 10.

11. Russell, op. cit., VIII, 124.

12. Cf. the following instance: “Mr. Stretch … said he had been told by the nephew of the Persian ambassador, that Lalla Rookh had been translated into their language … nor can they believe there but that the whole work has been taken originally from some Persian manuscript”: Russell, op. cit., III, 167; and see Ibid., III, 111; V, 134; and VII, 252-3.

13. Ibid., II, 264.

14. See Ibid., II, 313; III, 143; V, 240, 266, 268, 302; VI, 12, 112; and VII, 6.

15. Ibid., III, 144.

16. Moore, op. cit., VI, 228.

17. See loc. cit., footnotes.

18. Moore, op. cit., VI, 9; in two of the four poems which comprise Lalla Rookh, the idea of liberty in conflict with tyranny is strongly marked—an occidental idea that Moore felt obliged to explain:

    Objections may be made to my use of the word Liberty in this, and more especially in the story that follows it [i.e. “The Fire-worshippers”], as totally inapplicable to any state of things that has ever existed in the East; but though I cannot, of course, mean to employ it in that enlarged and noble sense which is so well understood at the present day … yet it is no disparagement to the word to apply it to that national independence, that freedom from the interference and dictation of foreigners … for which both Hindoos and Persians fought against their Mussulman invaders with, in many cases, a bravery that deserved better success. Ibid., VI, 145-6.

19. See Ibid., VI, 9-10; as a poem which presents occidental ideas in an oriental dress, Lalla Rookh may be compared to Southey's Thalaba. In both appear a prodigious amount of research and copious annotation.

20. Edinburgh Review, XXIX (Nov., 1817), 2.

21. Eclectic Review, N. S., VIII (Oct., 1817), 341.

22. See the British Review, X (1817), 33-4; cf. Lord John Russell's remark: “… the fault on which most readers dwell is that the feast is too sumptuous [in Lalla Rookh]”: Russell, op. cit., I, xxv.

23. See the British Review, X (1817), 32-3; and cf. the Critical Review, fifth series, V (1817), 560-70.

24. See the British Review, X (1817), 31-2.

25. See the Literary Panorama, N. S., VI (1817), 897-914; and cf. the British Review, X (1817), 35, where Moore's oriental lore is suspected of being newly-acquired, possessing only the “bloom of yesterday's learning.”

26. See, for example, the Morning Post for May 31, July 5, and September 3, 1817; the Literary Gazette for May 31, 1817; the Monthly Magazine, XLIII (1817), 450-1; and the Lady's Magazine, XLVIII (1817), 343 ff.

    For some of these references to Lalla Rookh in contemporary periodicals, I am indebted to Professor Howard Mumford Jones of Harvard University, whose biography of Moore, The Harp that Once, will soon be published.

27. Monthly Magazine, XLIII (1817), 450.

28. “No European image ever breaks or steals in to destroy the illusion—every tone, and hue, and form, is purely and intensely Asiatic”: Blackwood's Magazine, I (1817), 280.

29. See Moore, op. cit., VI, 323-6; and Russell, op. cit., VII, 183.

30. Moore, op. cit., VI, 331.

31. See, for example, Blackwood's Magazine, XIII (1823), 64-71; and the Eclectic Review, N. S., XIX (1823), 210-17.

32. See Russell, op. cit., IV, 41; and cf. Moore's own comment: “… had written to Longmans, that if they thought it not too late [on the eve of the fifth edition], I could make the ‘angels’ completely eastern, and thus get rid of that connection with the Scriptures, which they fear will, in the long run be a drag on the popularity of the poem”: Ibid., IV, 40.

33. Moore, op. cit., VI, 341.

34. Ibid., VI, 338.

35. Moore, op. cit., VI, 410.

36. See the Westminster Review, VIII (1827), 350-84.

37. Russell, op. cit., III, 129.

38. Ibid., III, 130; see also Ibid., III, 131-2, 143, 147, 150, 239, 241, and V, 46.

39. Russell, op. cit., V, 83.

40. Edward D. Clarke, Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa (London, 1816-20), fourth edition, V, 146-7.

41. I am preparing an article on “Robert Southey and English Interest in the Near East,” in which this fact will be demonstrated.

42. Moore remarks that, in a race for permanent greatness, “those little ponies, the ‘Melodies,’ will beat the mare, Lalla, hollow”: Russell, op. cit., VIII, 277.

43. See, for an account of this development, Martha P. Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1908), pp. 235-6.