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the fables of old Greece, Italy, Perfia, India, he derives from the north; and it must be owned, that he maintains his paradox with acuteness and learning. Great learning and great acuteness, together with the charms of a moft engaging style, were indeed neceffary to render even tolerable a system, which places an earthly paradise, the gardens of Hefperus, the islands of the Macares, the groves of Elyfium, if not of Eden, the heaven of INDRA, the Periftàn, or fairy-land, of the Perfian poets, with its city of diamonds and its country of Shádcàm, so named from Pleasure and Love, not in any climate, which the common fenfe of mankind confiders as the feat of delights, but beyond the mouth of the Oby, in the Frozen Sea, in a region equalled only by that, where the wild imagination of DANTE led him to fix the worst of criminals in a state of punishment after death, and of which he could not, he says, even think without fhivering. A very curious paffage in a tract of PLUTARCH on the figure in the Moon's orb, naturally induced M. BAILLY to place Ogygia in the north, and he concludes that ifland, as others have concluded rather fallaciously, to be the Atlantis of PLATO, but is at a lofs to determine, whether it was Ifeland or Grænland, Spitzberg or New Zembla: among so many charms it was difficult, indeed, to give a pre

ference; but our philofopher, though as much perplexed by an option of beauties as the shepherd of Ida, feems on the whole to think Zembla the most worthy of the golden fruit; because it is indifputably an ifland, and lies oppofite to a gulph near a continent, from which a great number of rivers defcend into the ocean. He appears equally diftreffed among five nations, real and imaginary, to fix upon that, which the Greeks named Atlantes; and his conclufion in both cafes muft remind us of the fhowman at Eton, who, having pointed out in his box all the crowned heads of the world, and being afked by the schoolboys, who looked through the glass, which was the Emperor, which the Pope, which the Sultan, and which the Great Mogul, answered eagerly, which you please, young gentlemen, which you please.' His letters, however, to VOLTAIRE, in which he unfolds his new fyftem to his friend, whom he had not been able to convince, are by no means to be derided; and his general propofition, that arts and sciences had their fource in Tartary, deferves a longer examination than can be given to it in this difcourfe: I fhall, nevertheless, with your permiffion, fhortly difcufs the question under the several heads, that will present themfelves in order.

Although we may naturally fuppofe, that the

numberless communities of Tartars, fome of whom are established in great cities, and fome encamped on plains in ambulatory mansions, which they remove from pafture to pasture, muft be as different in their features as in their dialects, yet, among those who have not emigrated into another country and mixed with another nation, we may difcern a family likeness, efpecially in their eyes and countenance, and in that configuration of lineaments, which we generally call a Tartar face; but, without making anxious inquiries, whether all the inhabitants of the vaft region before defcribed have fimilar features, we may conclude from thofe, whom we have seen, and from the original portraits of TAIMU'R and his defcendants, that the Tartars in general differ wholly in complexion and countenance from the Hindus and from the Arabs; an obfervation, which tends in fome degree to confirm the account given by modern Tartars themselves of their descent from a common ancestor. Unhappily their lineage cannot be proved by authentick pedigrees or hiftorical, monuments; for all their writings extant, even thofe in the Mogul dialect, are long fubfequent to the time of MUHAMMED; nor is it poffible to diftinguish their genuine traditions from those of the Arabs, whofe religious opinions they have in general adopted. At the beginning of the

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fourteenth century, Khwajah RASHID, furnamed FAD'LU'LLAH, a native of Kazvin; compiled his account of the Tartars and Mongals from the papers of one PU'LA'D, whom the great grandson of HOLACU' had fent into Tátáristàn for the fole purpose of collecting historical information; and the commiffion itself fhows, how little the Tartarian Princes really knew of their own origin. From this work of RASHID, and from other materials, ABU'LGHA'ZI, King of Khwárezm, compofed in the Mogul language his Genealogical Hiftory, which, having been purchased from a merchant of Bokhárà by fome Swedish officers, prisoners of war in Siberia, has found its way into feveral European tongues: it

contains much valuable matter, but, like all MuHAMMEDAN hiftories, exhibits tribes or nations as individual sovereigns; and, if Baron DE TOTT had not strangely neglected to procure a copy of the Tartarian history, for the original of which he unneceffarily offered a large fum, we should probably have found, that it begins with an account of the deluge taken from the Korán, and proceeds to rank TURC, CHIN, TATAR, and MONGAL, among the fons of YA'FET. The genuine traditional history of the Tartars, in all the books that I have inspected, seems to begin with OGHU'z, as that of the Hindus does with RAMA: they place their miraculous Hero and

Patriarch four thousand years before CHENGIZ KHAN, who was born in the year 1164, and with whofe reign their historical period commences. It is rather surprizing, that M. BAILLY, who makes frequent appeals to Etymological arguments, has not derived OGYGES from OGнU'z and ATLAS from Altai, or the Golden mountain of Tartary: the Greek terminations might have been rejected from both words; and a mere tranfpofition of letters is no difficulty with an Etymologist.

My remarks in this addrefs, gentlemen, will be confined to the period preceding CHENGIZ ; and, although the learned labours of M. DE GUIGNES and the fathers VISDELOU, DEMAILLA, and GAUBIL, who have made an incomparable use of their Chinese literature, exhibit probable accounts of the Tartars from a very early age, yet the old hiftorians of China were not only foreign, but generally hoftile, to them, and for both those reasons, either through ignorance or malignity, may be suspected of misrepresenting their transactions: if they speak truth, the ancient history of the Tartars presents us, like moft other hiftories, with a series of affaffinations, plots, treasons, maffacres, and all the natúral fruits of felfifh ambition. I fhould have no inclination to give you a sketch of fuch horrors, even if the occafion called for it; and will

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