It was late in the century before the Arabian tales,[29] translated from the French of M. Galland in 1708, appeared in English children’s books. In France, they received a welcome surpassing that of the fairy-tales, and produced a fantastic literature of supposed translations, in which Eastern imagery and the incidents of Western folk-lore were curiously mixed. Yet the new pattern was not altogether incongruous. Dwarfs and magicians were the stock figures of romance; the Quest of the Talking Bird, Singing Tree and Yellow Water was but a variant of the Fortune-Seeker’s adventures; the Magic Mirror a commonplace of fairy-tales; and there were old ballads, like “The Heir of Linne”, with Arabian, Persian and Turkish variants.