sensibility of feeling she explained to arise from the delicacy with which her father had brought her up. "Were you treated thus kindly by your father, and could you betray him?" said the indignant king; and he punished the cruel treason by a more cruel death: the fair traitress was dragged limb from limb by wild horses.

The cruel policy which had induced Ardashir to attempt the murder of Shahpour's mother, had led to the proscription of the family of Mahrek, an Ashkanian nobleman. His daughter made her escape from this tyranny, and lived for some time in the family of a herdsman, where she was seen by the young Shahpour when out on a hunting excursion. He loved and married her, and learning from her the fatal fact of her descent, he promised to keep this secret from his father, and even to conceal from him their marriage. Accident, however, revealed to Ardashir his son's alliance and the parentage of his wife but far from taking the violent measures his son had dreaded, the monarch was delighted to find thus harmlessly fulfilled the dreaded prophecy that his crown should pass to a descendant of the Ashkanians. Hormuz, the successor of Shahpour, was the fruit of this marriage. During the life-time of Shahpour, his courtiers endeavoured with success to prejudice him against his son, and to persuade him that he entertained treasonable designs against his father's crown. Hormuz heard of this, and cutting off his right hand, sent it to his father: for this mutilation, according to the law of Persia, incapacitated him from reigning. Shahpour, not less admiring the generosity of his son than shocked at this mark of it, declared that the prince should succeed him, in spite of this disqualification; and kept his word.

Of the reign of Hormuz our author relates little, but that he was distinguished for his good qualities, and his wise and just government. The succeeding sovereigns are dismissed with a very brief notice, until we reach the reign of Bahram. In his time arose the imposter Mani, the founder of the sect of Manichees, whose imposture is thus described by our historian:

As it had reached the ears of Mani, that Jesus, on whom be blessing! had said to his disciples, that after him should be sent the Paraclete, and that they should command their children to follow him, he pretended that he was pointed out under the name of the Paraclete the truth is, this blessed word is one of the names of his excellency, Mustafa-the blessing of God be on him! Nevertheless, Mani, under this vain pretence, laying claim to the gift of prophecy, put forth a book, which he called the Injil, and which he declared had descended to him from heaven. Masoudi says, that Shahpour was at first a convert to his sect, but afterwards receded from it, and persecuted Mani, who fled by way of Kashmir to Hindustan, and thence to China, and afterwards to Turkestan and Khatay. Now, Mani was an unrivalled statuary and painter. They say he could draw, with his finger, a circle of a koz in diameter, and that so accurately, that when examined with the compasses, no defect was found in the circumference in short, he lived in Hindustan and China in great reputation, and much accounted of from his skill in making beautiful images. And in the course of his wanderings amongst the countries of the East, it is said he found a cave in a mountain, where the air was pure, and where he had every thing his wants required; and here he took up his abode for a year, having first told Asiat.Journ. N.S.VOL.26.No.103. 2 H

his followers that he was about to be taken up into heaven, and should stay there for that time, and then return and bring them news from God. He bade them look for him in the beginning of the second year, in the vicinity of this cave, and then disappeared from their eyes, and concealed himself in the cave just mentioned, where for a year he busied himself in designing figures in a book which is called Ertenk Mani: and after the lapse of a year, he appeared again to his followers, with this book in his hand, covered with designs and adorned with paintings.

A series of brief and uninteresting notices of subsequent reigns brings us to that of Shapour, remarkable in European history for his conquest of the emperor Valerian, and the indignities he heaped upon him. The Persian history states that this was a reprisal for similar indignities inflicted upon Shapour. That he was recognized, whilst at Constantinople in disguise, from his resemblance to his picture painted by Mani, and obliged to witness the destructive progress of the imperial arms through his country; and that, having at length made his escape, he defeated Valerian's army, took him prisoner, and detained him until the damage done by his troops had been repaired, and a sum of money paid as a ransom for the Persian blood shed in the campaign. Shapour was called Zulektaf (lord of the shoulder-blades'), from his breaking the shoulder-blades of his Arabian captives.

Between this prince and Bahram Gour, four kings intervene, of whom little is related but the length of their reigns. Bahram is one of the most renowned monarchs in Persian history. His romantic bravery, his spirit of adventure, his love of the chase, of music, and of the fine arts, have all contributed to render him famous in eastern history, while oriental fable has made him the hero of some of her most delightful stories. His brothers had all died early, which induced his father, Yezdejird, to send him to Arabia, under the care of a friendly prince of that nation. To this education, amongst a romantic and hardy people, may be ascribed, in part, his bravery, his adventurous spirit, and that love of field-sports which has passed into a proverb. On the death of his father, another prince of the royal family was raised to the throne by the Persian nobles, and Bahram only obtained his right after a terrible struggle, which is thus described:

After much speaking and disputing on one side and the other, it was decided, with the concurrence of Bahram, that the royal diadem should be placed between two hungry lions, and that the kingly power should be given to him who should snatch it from between them. Then the commander of the forces brought into an enclosed space two furious lions and the Kaianian diadem; and Bahram said to Cosroe, "Step forward and take up the diadem." But Cosroe thought in himself,

The splendid diadem, when such a mortal fear is in the way to it,

Is, indeed, a heart-stirring ornament, but it is not worth the loss of the head. So he said to Bahram, “I am the actual possessor of crown and throne, and thou the pretender to them: it is thou that must venture first for the acquisition of them." The lion-hearted prince, on this, stepped towards the diadem, and was assailed by one of the lions. The young hunter leaped upon him, and struck him on the head with a stone; and when the second lion approached,

he seized him by the ears, and smote together the heads of the two, so that their brains were dashed out of their skulls and through their ears, and by the blows of the prince they were driven into the thicket of destruction; then he took the crown and placed it upon his head.

The mildness, justice, and benevolence of his administration, and his own fondness for elegant amusements, seem to have afforded the leisure and encouraged the taste for such pleasures, which became general amongst his people. Finding a deficiency of musicians amongst his own subjects, he sent for them from India; and from the great number of persons of this class who then came into Persia and settled, a class of men are supposed to descend who hold much the same anomalous position there as the gipsies in our own country. An irruption of Tatars interrupted for a while this universal festivity. The Khacan crossed the Jihoun with an immense army, laid waste the country as he advanced, and saw Bahram retire before him, leaving both the enemy and his own nobles and people under the impression that he had fled from terror of the invader. But when the barbarian leader was thus lulled into perfect security, he was surprised by a night attack from Bahrani, who had returned with a chosen band of his bravest warriors, "men who would fearlessly place their foot in the lion's mouth, and advance into the jaws of the crocodile." Each carried on his horse's neck the dried skin of a bullock, filled with stones; and the suddenness of the attack, the extraordinary noise thus produced, and the daring valour of the little band and their heroic leader, spread a panic through the immense Tatar host, and many of them were slaughtered. Bahram killed the Khacan with his own hand, and the kingdom was wholly delivered from its northern invaders by this bold manoeuvre of her monarch.

A long and romantic story is then told of a journey taken by this monarch in disguise into India. He is there said, single-handed, to have slain an enormous elephant, which had long kept the inhabitants of the metropolis in terror, and wholly taken possession of the road between the jungle it inhabited and the city.

Bahram fell, at length, a victim to his passion for hunting: he stumbled into a large pit of water, or natural well, in which he sank, and the Persian annalist declares that neither horse nor man were ever seen again.

The incursion of the Tatars in this reign seems to have brought the two races in closer contact; nor was their intercourse always of a hostile character. Khosh Nuaz, one of their kings, assisted Firoz against his brother, Hormuz, and established him on the throne: a service which was repaid by an invasion of his territories by the ungrateful sovereign. In the first instance, this was generously pardoned by the Tatar king, but in a second irruption of the Persians, Firoz was slain.

He was succeeded by his son Palash; and Kobad, his brother, making his escape from him into Tatary, was brought back after the lapse of four years, and established upon the throne, as his father had been, by the generous Tatar monarch. Kobad, in his flight, had stayed one day at the house of a nobleman, with whose daughter he fell in love; and on his return, found

the result of his brief acquaintance with his beautiful bride was a lovely boy of three years: this son was named Cosroe, but is better known under his title of Nushirvan Adil-Nushirvan the Just-a name by which he has been celebrated through all subsequent ages. The reign of Kobad was marked by the prevalence of the heresy of Mazdak, a wretched impostor, who held the doctrine of the community of goods and of wives; and whose followers, acting up to his doctrine, and combining the power with the will to do evil, became the scourge of the unhappy country in which their strange heresy prevailed. Kobad himself embraced the detestable doctrine, and all the earnest remonstrances of the indignant Nushirvan were necessary to prevent his mother from being sacrificed, by her infatuated husband, to the lawless passion of Mazdak. On Nushirvan's accession to the throne, he was obliged, for a while, to temporize with the impostor, till the establishment of his government gave him the power, and the heresiarch's excesses a pretext, to put him to death. His followers were punished by death and confiscation of goods, which were returned, as far as possible, to those from whom they had been forcibly taken away. The number of these sacrifices to offended justice and humanity was very great: a hundred thousand stakes are said to have impaled as many wretched fanatics.

The reign of Nushirvan, though the most prosperous and renowned in the Iranian history, was disturbed by a bitter domestic calamity. His son Noushizad, the child of a Christian wife, rebelled against his father, and seizing the occasion of his absence in Syria, and the report of his death, gathered together a considerable body of Christians, and made a formidable show of opposition. Nushirvan, like David of old, gave strict charges to his generals to preserve the life of his guilty son, and these charges were as inefficient as those of the Jewish monarch. Noushizad's last words were, to desire that he might be buried with Christian rites; and his father was long inconsolable for the scion of his royal house which had thus perished.

This monarch was alike famed for the wisdom of his internal policy, and the extent of his foreign conquests. On the side of Tatary, Arabia, and Syria, he made extensive conquests: he humbled the pride of the Greek emperor in many battles, and raised the Persian empire to a height of power which it had never before attained. He encouraged the arts of life, made the most judicious arrangements for the administration of justice, and, by a division of the Persian provinces into four parts, over each of which he appointed a trusty vicegerent, provided for the more careful supervision of his whole empire.

The reign of his son, Hormuz, who had during his father's life-time acquired much military reputation, commenced under the most happy auspices, and for nearly twelve years of successful administration he sustained the high reputation of his father. But intoxicated, perhaps, by success, he at length lapsed into tyranny: his nobles rebelled against a monarch who had thinned their numbers by his cruelties; his dominions were invaded by the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Tatars; and his unworthy treatment of his gallant general, Baharam Choubin, who had signalized himself against the last

named enemy, completed his ruin. Baharam rebelled, threw his king into prison, and set up Khosru Parviz, the son of the deposed monarch, as a pageant to favour his own usurpation of the throne. The public voice, however, was for the young prince, who, during the course of these troubles, had taken refuge in the Greek empire: he was recalled, formally crowned, and two of his uncles removed the only impediment to his dominion, by butchering the unfortunate Hormuz in prison-an act for which they were themselves put to death by the young king.

The reign and the personal history of Khosru, like those of Bahram Gour, have furnished many materials for oriental fiction. His unbounded magnificence, the luxury in which he lived, the beauty and romantic history of his fair wife Shirin, have been recorded with all the embellishments of eastern imagination. He extended his conquests widely, too, into the eastern portion of the Greek empire, took Jerusalem, and, as the Persian historian assures us, obtained possession of the holy cross, which was found cased in gold and buried deeply in the ground. His fate, in many respects, resembles that of his father. Reverses of fortune, aggravated by his own supineness and luxury, raised against him the nobles of the kingdom: he was thrown into prison, where he languished till the hand of an assassin, at the direct instigation of his unnatural son, closed a life of unparalleled splendour, by a terrible and retributive death. Shirouiah, the parricide, did not long enjoy the fruits of his crime. He seems to have died under the terrors of remorse, within a few months of his ascending the throne.

The rest of the history of Persia, till its final conquest by the Mohamedan Arabs, is a mere detail of usurpations and depositions, till we reach the reign of Yezdejird, under whom the Persians sustained a signal defeat, in which their monarch was slain, their independence destroyed, and their rich and powerful empire rendered tributary to the soldiers whom they had so lately despised as the "naked eaters of lizards of the deserts."

ODE ON HUMAN LIFE.

(FROM THE CHINESE.)*

IN Spring, to wander o'er the earth, whose hues
Are vivid with the fresh and fragrant flowers;
In Summer's heat, o'er lilied pools to muse;

To quaff the wine in Autumn's fading bowers;
And when the snowy blast of Winter's strong,
To listen to an ancient poet's song.

At nights-the unexpected nights-to rest
Until the unasked-for morns again unclose :

Such is a life of Virtue! ah, how blest

Year after year in calm succession flows!

B.

From a pair of vases in the possession of Sir Hillgrove Turner.