Note 87 — Chapter VI · THE FIRST CONTACT BETWEEN GREEK AND JEW

The untutored philosophers of Voltaire’s stories were quite in the mode of the eighteenth century, which had discovered the “noble savage,” and were quite convinced that civilization was a retrogression from a state of rude and primitive virtue. It was, further, a convenient cloak behind which one might criticise an autocratic régime. Hence the flood of “Turkish,” “Chinese,” “Japanese,” etc. “Letters,” of which Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes are the most famous. Modern instances are “The Traveller from Altruria” of Mr. Howells, and Mr. Dickinson’s “Letters of a Chinese Official.”