been generally confined to bordering kingdoms under feudatory princes; and the first Persian Emperor, whofe life and character they feem to have known with tolerable accuracy, was the great CYRUS, whom I call, without fear of contradiction, СAIKHOSRAU; for I shall then only doubt that the KHOSRAU of FIRDAUSI' was the CYRUS of the first Greek hiftorian, and the Hero of the oldest political and moral romance, when I doubt that LOUIS Quatorze and LEWIS the Fourteenth were one and the fame French King: it is utterly incredible, that two different princes of Perfia fhould each have been born in a foreign and hostile territory; fhould each have been doomed to death in his infancy by his maternal grandfather in confequence of portentous dreams, real or invented; fhould each have been faved by the remorfe of his deftined murderer, and fhould each, after a fimilar education among herdfmen, as the fon of a herdfman, have found means to revisit his paternal kingdom, and having delivered it, after a long and triumphant war, from the tyrant, who had invaded it, fhould have restored it to the fummit of power and magnificence. Whether fo romantick a story, which is the fubject of an Epick Poem, as majestick and entire as the Iliad, be historically true, we may feel perhaps an inclination to doubt; but it cannot, with reafon be denied,

that the outline of it related to a fingle Hero, whom the Afiaticks, converfing with the father of European history, defcribed according to their popular traditions by his true name, which the Greek alphabet could not exprefs: nor will a difference of names affect the question; since the Greeks had little regard for truth, which they facrificed willingly to the Graces of their language, and the nicety of their ears; and, if they could render foreign words melodious, they were never folicitous to make them exact; hence they probably formed CAMBYSES from CA'MBAKHSH, or Granting defires, a title rather than a name, and XERXES from SHI'RU'YI, a Prince and warriour in the Shábnámah, or from SHIRSHAH, which might also have been a title ; for the Afiatick Princes have constantly affumed new titles or epithets at different periods of their lives, or on different occasions; a custom, which we have feen prevalent in our own times both in Iràn and Hinduftán, and which has been a fource of great confusion even in the feriptural accounts of Babylonian occurrences: both Greeks and Jews have in fact accommodated Perfian names to their own articulation; and both feem to have difregarded the native literature of Iràn, without which they could at moft attain a general and imperfect knowledge of the country. As to the Perfians themselves, who were contemporary

with the Jews and Greeks, they must have been acquainted with the hiftory of their own times, and with the traditional accounts of paft ages; but for a reason, which will presently appear, they chose to confider CAYU'MERS as the founder of the empire; and, in the numerous distractions, which followed the overthrow of Da'ra', especially in the great revolution on the defeat of YEZDEGIRD, their civil hiftories were loft, as thofe of India have unhappily been, from the folicitude of the priefts, the only depofitaries of their learning, to preserve their books of law and religion at the expenfe of all others: hence it has happened, that nothing remains of genuine Perfian history before the dynasty of SA'sa'n, except a few ruftick traditions and fables, which furnished materials for the Shábnámab, and which are ftill fuppofed to exift in the Pahlavi language. The annals of the Pishdádì, or Affyrian, race must be confidered as dark and fabulous; and those of the Cayání family, or the Medes and Perfians, as heroick and poetical; though the lunar eclipfes, faid to be mentioned by PTOLEMY, fix the time of GUSHTASP, the prince, by whom ZERA TUSHT was protected: of the Parthian kings defcended from ARSHAC or ARSACES, we know little more than the names; but the Sáfani's had fo long an intercourfe with the Emperors of Rome and Byzantium, that the period

of their dominion may be called an historical age. In attempting to ascertain the beginning. of the Affyrian empire, we are deluded, as in a thousand instances, by names arbitrarily impofed: it had been fettled by chronologers, that the first monarchy established in Perfia was the Affyrian; and NEWTON, finding some of opinion, that it rose in the first century after the Flood, but unable by his own calculations to extend it farther back than feven hundred and ninety years before CHRIST, rejected part of the old system and adopted the rest of it; concluding, that the Affy rian Monarchs began to reign about two hundred years after SOLOMON, and that, in all preceding ages, the government of Iran had been divided into several petty states and principalities. Of this opinion I confess myself to have been; when, difregarding the wild chronology of the Mufelmàns and Gabrs, I had allowed the utmost natural ́ duration to the reigns of eleven Pifbdádi kings, without being able to add more than a hundred years to NEWTON's computation. It seemed, indeed, unaccountably strange, that, although ABRAHAM had found a regular monarchy in Egypt, although the kingdom of Yemen had just pretenfions to very high antiquity, although the Chinese, in the twelfth century before our era, had made approaches at least to the present form of their extenfive dominion, and although we

can hardly fuppofe the first Indian monarchs to have reigned less than three thousand years ago, yet Perfia, the most delightful, the most compact, the most defirable country of them all, fhould have remained for fo many ages unfettled and difunited. A fortunate discovery, for which I was firft indebted to Mir MUHAMMED HUSAIN, one of the moft intelligent Mufelmans in India, has at once diffipated the cloud, and caft a gleam of light on the primeval history of Iràn and of the human race, of which I had long defpaired, and which could hardly have dawned from any other quarter.

The rare and interesting tract on twelve different religions, entitled the Dabistàn, and compofed, by a Mohammedan traveller, a native of Cashmir, named MOHSAN, but diftinguished by the affumed furname of FA'NI', or Perishable, begins with a wonderfully curious chapter on the religion of HU'SHANG, which was long anterior to that of ZERA TUSHT, but had continued to be secretly professed by many learned Perfians even to the author's time; and feveral of the moft eminent of them, diffenting in many points from the Gabrs, and perfecuted by the ruling powers of their country, had retired to India; where they compiled a number of books, now extremely scarce, which MOHSAN had perused, and with the writers of which, or with many of