Excerpt from China in English Literature
Were one to ask the ordinary educated Englishman or Englishwoman for references to China in English literature, they would probably be exhausted by two well-known quotations, one from Tennyson and one from Dr. Johnson.
"Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay."
This in itself betrays an ignorance of the land to which the poet refers, for it obviously did not enter into his mind that a real "cycle of Cathay" only amounted to sixty years. In the second, China is nothing more than a geographical term.
"Let observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru."
Were the person interrogated to extend his definition of English literature so as to include American, he might quote to you Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee," and who knows how much influence that amusing set of verses has had on the mind of the average man in giving him altogether erroneous ideas about the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire?
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