NOTES. 
401 
the almost total desertion of the city during the heats of summer. Journal, &c. p. 55. 
In one of Mr. Morier’s routes in the Appendix, Teheran is represented as containing 
twelve thousand houses, a better estimate of its size than the number of inhabitants. 
Ark, p. 225.] — Ark is obviously, Arx. 
Impress , p. 225.] —This impress was by no means pecular to Persia. Many instances 
might be given from our own history down to the reign of Elizabeth : but it is sufficient 
to refer to those connected with the subject in the text. Henry VI. pressed minstrels 
4< in solatium regis;” almost the very act of the King of Persia. Edward VI. thus 
supplied his choir, (Barrington on the Statutes, p. 337); and in the reign of Eliza¬ 
beth, under one of the commissions to take up all singing children for the use of the Queen’s 
chapel, Tusser, the author of the Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, was impressed. 
See Lysons’s Environs of London, vol i. p. 92. 
“ Thence for my voice, I must no choice, 
“ Away of force, like posting horse 
“ For sundry men, had placards then 
“ Such child to take,—” 
Female Officers, p. 225. — Seradj ed Dowlaii had a female guard of Cal mucks, 
Tartars, Georgians, Negroes and Abyssinians. (Seir Mutagherin, vol. i. p. 146.) Nas- 
sureddeen peopled a city entirely with women; all the officers being of that sex. He is 
said to have had fifteen thousand women. (Gladwin, Hist, of Indostan, vol. i. p 114.) 
It is very possible that some such caprice of an Oriental despot may have given rise to the 
cities of men and women on different sides of the Ganges, of which we read in 
Palladius, p. 9; and St. Ambrose, p. 34: at the end of Bysiie’s “Palladius de 
u Gentibus Indiae,” and not very improbable that it may have produced the tradition so 
common in the early travellers, of the islands of men and women, and perhaps the whole 
fable of the Amazons. See of the islands the Arabian travellers of Renaudot, Marco 
Polo, lib. iii. Fra Mauro in Vincent’s Periplus, p. 671. See a curious note on the 
word Hamazen, “ all women,” in Moor’s Infanticide, p. 82. 
Fall in Hafiz, p. 229.] —It is scarcely necessary to refer to more ancient divination ; 
but the resemblance between the Persian trial and that of the Sortes VirgiHance must 
occur to every reader. The Mahomedans have another oracle in the Koran , which they 
consult in the same manner: and the Jews had similar recourse to the Scriptures of the 
Old Testament. Sale’s Koran. Prelim. Dissert. § iii. p. 69. The authority of Virgil 
(and indeed, though less currently, of Homer also,) remained in full force to the middle at 
least of the seventeenth century, as in the first instance the appeal of Charles l. and Lord 
Falkland sufficiently proves : Johnson’s Life of Cow ley, p. 13. Even the Bible was 
thus opened for divination. Ars Magica, 1638, p. iii. 
3 F 
