hysics, 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 of that age was monstrous, full of the most absurd and
ex