The Arabs were as fond of letters as of war.  In the eighth century, when they overran the Asiatic provinces, they found many Greek books which they read with eagerness.  They translated such as best pleased them into Arabic.  Greek poetry they rejected because it was polytheistic.  Of Greek history they made no use, because it recorded events prior to the advent of their prophet.  The politics of Greece and its eloquence were not congenial to their despotic notions, and so they passed them by.  Grecian ethics were suspended by the Koran, hence Plato was overlooked.  Mathematics, metaphysics, logic, and medicine, accorded with their tastes.  Hence they translated and studied Aristotle, Galen, and Hippocrates, and illustrated them with voluminous commentaries.  These works stimulated native authors to write new treatises.  The Arabs, therefore, became distinguished for their skill in logic, medicine, mathematics, and kindred studies.  They founded universities during the eighth century in the cities of Spain and Africa.  Charlemagne commanded their books to be translated into Latin; thus Aristotle entered Europe through Asia by the double door of the Arabic and Latin tongues, and, by long prescription, still holds his place in European schools.

Charlemagne founded the universities of Bononia, Pavia, Paris, and Osnaburg, in Hanover.  These became centres for propagating the new sciences.  The Normans, too, shared in the general progress of learning, and carried with them their attainments into England.  The wild imagination of the Saracens kindled a love of romantic fiction, wherever 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