In the previous chapter I discussed how in his essay ‘On Fable and Romance’ James Beattie presented ‘oriental tales’ as bearing the indelible imprint of Eastern despotism. In correspondence with Elizabeth Montagu in 1772, Beattie claimed that the works collected in Sir William Jones’s Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages were just as revelatory about ‘the minds and manners of the people among whom they [were] produced’. One explanation for the ‘glaring images, exaggerated metaphors, and gigantic descriptions’ of the poetry of ‘eastern nations’, he suggested, was that Eastern peoples were ‘unfriendly to liberty’ – their ‘ignorance and indolence’ disposing them ‘to regard their governors as of supernatural dignity, and to decorate them with … high-sounding titles’, so as to ‘infect their whole conversation with bombast’. In the letter to which Beattie responded, however, Montagu – who, unlike Beattie, had read the works in question – praised the mastery of ‘oriental languages’ and versification that they displayed: ‘there is a gaiety and splendour in the poems,’ she stated, ‘which is naturally derived from the happy soil and climate of the poets, and they breathe Asiatic luxury.’ While Montagu signalled her awareness that Jones’s poems were ‘imitations of Asiatic poetry’, she nonetheless confessed to her absorption in their literary novelty: ‘the descriptions are so fine, and all the objects so brilliant, that the sense akes at them, and I wished that Ossian’s poems had been laying by me, that I might sometimes have turned my eyes, from the dazzling splendour of the eastern noonday, to the moonlight picture of a bleak mountain.’ Montagu was much more enthusiastic than Beattie about the possibility of an ‘Oriental’ poetry, then, and she invoked ‘northern’ climes as a relief from sensory overload, rather than, as Beattie did in The Minstrel (1771–4), the locus of a vitalizing ‘freedom’ or a ‘boundless store/ Of charms’ requiring no external supplement.