﻿ON THE ARABS. '$ 



history of such a conqueror or legislator as the great 

 Sesac, who is said to have raised pillars in Yemen as 

 well as at the mouth of the Ganges, yet, since we 

 know that Sac-xa is a title of Buddha, whom some sup- 

 pose to be Woden, since Buddha was not a native of 

 India, and since the age of Sesac perfectly agrees with 

 that of Sacya, we may form a plausible conjecture 

 that they -were in fact the same person who travelled 

 eastward from Ethiopia, either as a warrior or as a law- 

 giver, about a thousand years before Christ, and whose 

 rites we now see extended as far as the country of 

 JSison, or, as the Chinese call it, Japuen, both words 

 signifying the Rising Sun. Sacya may be derived from 

 a word meaning power, or from another denoting ve- 

 getable food ; so that this epithet will not determine 

 whether he was a hero or a philosopher ; but the title 

 Buddha or wise, may induce us to believe that he was 

 rather a benefactor than a destroyer of his species : 

 if his religion, however, was really introduced into any 

 part of Arabia, it could not have been general in that 

 country; and we may safely pronounce, that before 

 the Mohammedan revolution, the noble and learned 

 Arabs were Theists, but that a stupid idolatry pre- 

 vailed amorfg the lower orders of the people. 



I find no trace among them, till their emigration, of 

 any philosophy but ethics; and even their system of 

 morals, generous and enlarged as it seems to have been 

 in the minds of a few illustrious-chieftains, was on the 

 whole miserably depraved for a century at least before 

 Muhammed. The distinguishing virtues which they 

 boasted of inculcating and practising, were a con- 

 tempt of riches and even of death ; but, in the age 

 of the Seven Poets, their liberality had deviated into 

 mad profusion, their courage into ferocity, and their 

 patience into an obstinate spirit of encountering fruit- 

 less dangers ; but I forbear to expatiate on the man- 

 ners of the Arabs in that age, because the poems, en- 



