TABRIZ. 
285 
shawls and gold stuffs are strewed on the ground, over which he walks: 
a part of the ceremony which is called the Pai-endaz. 
28th. I dined with Mirza Hass an, son of the first Minister, 
Mirza Bozurk. There were a number of young and pleasant men, 
who would have enlivened any company; but they seemed to vie with 
each other in the marvellous. As a specimen; a Derveish had told 
one, that he was in his room when a shock of an earthquake threw him 
on the floor, where he lay for a long time in a trance; and on recover¬ 
ing, found himself, to his great surprise, extended in the court-yard, 
close under his apartment: a second shock having projected him sense¬ 
less out of the window. Of slight-of-hand they recounted the most 
wonderful feats; and to all this, they swear by each other's heads, 
eyes, sons, and fathers. The surest prognostic, indeed, of a falsehood is 
the number of emphatic oaths by which it is preceded. The Per¬ 
sians are called, with sufficient propriety, the Frenchmen of the East; 
they are indeed a talkative, complimentary, and insincere people, yet 
in manners agreeable and enlivening. 
A description of the etiquettes of the court, or even of private life, 
in Persia, would be a work of endless and trifling minutiae. They are 
such however, and so well recognised, and so easily observed and 
imitated by every class from their youth, and indeed (in the government 
under which they live) so strongly mark the gradations of rank, that 
no person, even of the meanest condition, is ignorant of his proper 
situation, and of the several etiquettes attached to it. In the educa¬ 
tion of a young man of family, the principal feature is the course of 
instruction which he receives in the forms and phrases of society. For 
that purpose, from the earliest age of the pupil, masters attend who 
teach the modes of salutation, and the appropriate compliments to 
superiors and inferiors. They also instruct him, where to sit on enter¬ 
ing a Mujlis (or assembly); of whom he has the right of precedence, 
&c. and greater importance is assigned to this knowledge than almost 
to any thing else. Nothing marks this more strongly than the forms 
which gradually ascend in a regular scale from the peasant to the King, 
