The Light of Asia, Being the Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Buddhism (1879).
His verse epic on the life of Buddha was one of three that came out during the same period. One was Richard Phillip's The Story of Gautama Buddha and His Creed: An Epic (1871), and another shorter one was Sidney Arthur Alexander's Sakya-Muni: The Story of Buddha (1887). Four book-length rebuttals were published, all by Christian clergy. These are listed by Franklin in note 7: Richard Collins, Buddhism and 'The Light of Asia' (1893); G.T. Flanders, Christ or Buddha? (1881); S.H. Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light of the World (1885); and C.W. Wilkinson, Edwin Arnold as Poetizer and as Paganizer (1884). Two Americans were inspired to copy Arnold by making verse narratives of Buddha's life: Henry Thayer Niles, The Dawn and the Day, or, The Buddha and the Christ (1894) and E.D. Root, Sakya Buddha: A Versified, Annotated Narrative of His Life and Teachings; with an Excursus, containing Citations from the Dhammapada, or Buddhist Canon (1880). See J. Jeffrey Franklin, The Life of the Buddha in Victorian England, English Literary History, vol. 72, no. 4 (2005), pp. 941-974.
