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Sir William Jones and English Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

V. De Sola Pinto
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Extract

The Cambridge History of English Literature dismisses Sir William Jones in one short paragraph at the end of the chapter by the late Professor Saintsbury on “The Lesser Poets of the Eighteenth Century”. Here he is described as “more of an orientalist and a jurist than a poet”, and brief commendation is given to his Ode in Imitation of Alcaeus and his Epigram from the Persian. There is no mention either of his other English works or his influence on English poetry. None of the shorter histories of English literature, as far as I know, alludes to him at all, although they all devote a good deal of space to the so-called “Precursors of Romanticism” in the eighteenth century. Professor R. M. Hewitt in his valuable essay, Harmonious Jones, the best appreciation of Sir William Jones as an English writer which has hitherto appeared, has pointed out that “recent histories of literature, though they still find room for James Macpherson, omit even the name of Sir William Jones, whose influence on poetry and on public opinion and general culture has been both more extensive and more permanent”.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , February 1946 , pp. 686 - 694
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1946

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References

page 686 note 1 Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association. vol.XXVIII, p. 43Google Scholar.

page 686 note 2 The popoularity of Jones' writings in the first decades of the nineteenth century is attested by the fact that besides these four editions of his poems a second edition of his collected works in 13 Volumes appeared in 1807.

page 687 note 1 Jones's version of this poem in graceful heroic couplets may be compared with the later translation by E. J. W. Gibb, where an attempt is made to reproduce the metre of the Turkish original.

page 692 note 1 The time is Carrickfergus, cf. Sir W. Scott's Health to Lord Melville, written for the same tune.

page 693 note 1 Tennyson, a Memoir, by Tennyson, Hallam, i, 195Google Scholar.

page 693 note 2 Peck, W., Shelley, his Life and Work (1927), i. 25, 76Google Scholar.

page 693 note 3 Koeppel, E. “Shelle's Queen Mab and Sir William Jones's Palace of Fortune,” Englische Studien, XXXIII, 43–53Google Scholar.

page 693 note 4 shelley may also have read Jones's Batanical Observations on Indian Plants, where the “strong aromatick scent” of the “gold-coloured champac” is mentioned (Works, ii, 94).