defends his life as a free man by denying a prince’s right to put him to death, because he is not a royal subject of the prince: Dryden likely learned the term noble savage from the History of New France (Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, 1609), by the explorer Marc Lescarbot, about his expedition to the colony of Acadia (1606–1607) in French North America, which contains a chapter titled “The Savages are Truly Noble” that discusses the apolitical freedom of the American Indians to hunt game, unlike in monarchic Europe where hunting is a right exclusive to the aristocracy. As an explorer of lands unknown to European white men, the Frenchman Lescarbot had a positive perception of the native Indian cultures of North America, unlike the English negative cultural preconceptions about the savage who is not English, based upon expansionist conflicts with the Irish pastoralists, the English isolation from Europe, and the English cultural denigration of their Continental neighbours. 18th-century By the 18th century, Montaigne’s predecessor to the noble savage, nature’s gentleman was a stock character usual to the sentimental literature of the time, for which a type of non-European Other became a background character for European stories about adventurous Europeans in the strange lands beyond continental Europe. For the novels, the opera, and the stageplays, the stock of characters included the “Virtuous Milkmaid” and the “Servant-More-Clever-than-The-Master” (e.g. Sancho Panza and Figaro), literary characters who personify the moral superiority of working-class people in the fictional world of the story. In English literature, British North America was the geographic locus classicus for adventure and exploration stories about European encounters with the noble savage natives, such as the novel The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826), by James Fenimore Cooper, and the epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855), by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which presented the primitivism (geographic, cultural, political) of North America as an ideal place for European Man to commune with Nature, far from the artifice of civilisation. In the poem “An Essay on Man” (1734), the Englishman Alexander Pope portrays the American Indian thus: To the English intellectual Pope, the American Indian was an abstract being unlike his insular European self; thus, from the Western perspective of “An Essay on Man”, Pope’s metaphoric usage of poor means “uneducated and a heathen”, but also denotes a savage who is happy with his rustic life in harmony with Nature,