254    THE EARLY LIFE OF ROBERT SOUTHEY
unfortunately it was only profession, - seriously to "illus-
trate" Oriental things in English poetry. From the first
translation of the Arabian Nights out of Galland's French
early in the eighteenth century, eastern material had been
used in some form or other by many writers in English for
a variety of purposes. That famous work was followed
by the translation out of French of similar collections which
had been drawn from the original languages or spuriously
concocted. Eastern costume and machinery were speedily
used on the continent and in England as a vehicle for satire
and, as is often the case with romantic material, for moral
and philosophical didacticism. In this field the Oriental
tale achieved its greatest strictly literary distinction in such
hands as those of Addison, Steele, Montesquieu, Voltaire,
Johnson, Goldsmith, and others. Eastern names and scen-
ery had also been used in poetry for purely decorative
purposes by such men as Parnell, Collins, and Chatterton,
but their performances had attained no popularity to com-
pare with that of the Oriental tale pure and simple or with
the Oriental apologue. None of these attempts, moreover,
had ostensibly enlisted all the apparatus of scholarship in
order to "illustrate" the Orient for western minds; satire,
moral or philosophical instruction, and pure entertainment
had been the sole objects. The growing importance for
England of India, to be sure, was fostering an interest in
the east which became truly scholarly in the work of Sir
William Jones, but Beckford's Vathek (1786) was the first
attempt to employ the results of such learning in new work.
Yet even so, the Oriental learning in Vathek, although it
appears that Beckford himself was not ignorant of the
matter, was supplied chiefly in the footnotes by Henley,
who was the prime instigator in the composition of the
story, and who translated it from the original French.
Henley pretended that he obtained the story from the
Arabic, but he quoted freely from Sale and D'Herbelot, and