﻿ON THE PERSIANS. 45 



Ir may seem strange, that the ancient history of so 

 distinguished an empire should be yet so imperfectly 

 known ; but very satisfactory reasons may be assigned 

 for our ignorance of it : the principal of them are 

 the superficial knowledge of the Greeks and Jews, 

 and the loss of Persian archives, or historical compo- 

 sitions. That the Grecian writers, before Xenophon, 

 had no acquaintance with Persia, and that all their 

 accounts of it are wholly fabulous, is a paradox too 

 extravagant to be seriously maintained : but their con- 

 nection with it in war or peace had, indeed, been ge- 

 nerally confined to bordering kingdoms under feuda- 

 tory princes ; and the first Persian emperor, whose 

 life and character they seem to have known with tole- 

 rable accuracy, was the great Cyrus, whom I call, 

 without fear of contradiction, Caikhosrau ; for I shall 

 then only doubt that the Khosrau of Firdausi was 

 the Cyrus of the first Greek historian, and the hero 

 of the oldest political and moral romance, when I 

 doubt that Louis Qiiatorze and Lewis the Fourteenth 

 were one and the same French King. It is utterly in- 

 credible that two different princes of Persia should 

 each have been born in a foreign and hostile territory ; 

 should each have been doomed to death in his infancy 

 by his maternal grandfather in consequence of por- 

 tentous dreams, real or invented ; should each have 

 been saved by the remorse of his destined murderer ; 

 and should each, after a similar education among 

 herdsmen, as the son of a herdsman, 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, should have restored it to 

 the summit of power and magnificence ! Whether so 

 romantic a story, which is the subject of an epic poem, 

 as majestic and entire as the Iliad, be historically true, 

 we may feel perhaps an inclination to doubt ; but it 

 cannot with reason be denied, that the outline of i" 

 related to a single hero, whom the Asiatics, con 



