'Inσous elne,-λéywv-et respondens Jesus dixit,-dicens:-and Jesus answering spake unto the Lawyers and Pharisees, saying; Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath day? With his usual fine taste, Addison caught this real oriental method of telling a story; and has often availed himself of it in giving an English dress to the many eastern parables, with which he has decorated the pages of his Spectators, &c.; and I shall finish with giving literal translations of two originals of his fables from the works of Sadī, which he must have copied from that best of oriental travellers, Sir John Chardin, a valuable edition of whose work was published about twelve years ago at Paris; for being a refugee with us he wrote it in French; but, though he travelled under the patronage of our Charles the Second, no complete translation of it has ever appeared in English! Like our Saviour, Sadi introduces some of his most beautiful apologues as parables in his theological discourses; and in his Resalah ii. Sermon 4. he delivers himself as follows; and it is rendered as literal as English words can make it: "One day Ibraham Idham, the king of Balkh, was seated in the porch of his palace with his ministers and court standing round him in attendance, when, lo! a poor derwish, with a patched cloak, a scrip and staff, presented himself, and was making good his way into the royal residence. The servants called to him saying, O reverend Sir! whither art thou going? He replied, I am going into this inn. They said, This is the palace of the king of Balkh. The king, noticing the bustle, desired they would permit him to approach, when he observed to him, saying, O derwish! this is my palace, and no inn. The derwish asked him, O Ibrahim! whose house was this originally? He replied, The house and mansion of my grandfather. And when he departed this life, whose house was it? He replied, My father's. And when thy father died, whose did it become? He replied, It became mine. And when thou also art gone, to whom will it belong? He replied, To the prince my The derwish now said, O Ibraham! a house, which one man is in this fashion entering, and another quitting, may be an inn, but is the palace or fixed habitation of no man!" son. Ev'n kings but act their parts, and when they've done In No. 289 of the Spectator may be seen Addison's admirable imitation of this; and in No. 293 is his imitation of that most poetical and beautiful sentiment of humility, as contained in only five couplets of the original Persian text in the Bostan iv. 2. of Sadi; and in like manner this is a verbal translation: "A solitary drop of water, as it fell from a cloud, blushed, when it saw the immense extent of the sea, saying, Where the ocean exists? what place is left for me? if it has a being, my God! what am I? While it was thus viewing itself with the eye of humility, a mother of pearl took it into its bosom, and nourished it with its whole soul: fortune ushered it into an exalted station, for it ripened in this shell into a precious pearl, and became the chief jewel of the imperial diadem of Persia: it rose into dignified eminence, because its walk was humble, and it knocked at the gate of annihilation, till it got an entrance into illustrious existence." Let me add another apologue from his Bostan x. 5. in confirmation of what I have before stated, that Sadī, but not I fancy from ignorance, often confounds the characters of an Idolater and Fire-worshipper: it is also an instance of oriental toleration. Apologue Bostan x. 5. "A Mogh, or fire-worshipper, had secluded himself from the world, and devoted his whole time to the service of an idol: after some years that professor of a detestable belief happened to fall into distressed circumstances. Confident of succour he threw himself at the feet of his idol, and lay prostrate and helpless on the floor of its temple, saying, I am undone; take me, O object of my adoration, by the hand! I am afflicted to the soul, have compassion on my body! He would often be thus fervent in his devotion, for his affairs were not in the train of being settled: for how shall an image forward a man's concerns which cannot drive away a fly from settling on its own body? The Mogh waxed warm and cried, O slave of sin! for how many years have I worshipped you in vain? accomplish for me the object I have at heart, otherwise I will ask it of the Lord God Paramount. That contaminated Mogh still lay with his face in the dust, now that the pure spirit of God had granted his prayer. An orthodox believer, whose whole life of piety had been clouded with misfortune, expressed his surprise at this, and said, Here is a stiff-necked and abominable Mogh, whose head is still filled with the fumes of his wine-shop, his mind debauched with infidelity, and his hand soiled with perfidy, yet has God accomplished the object of his wish! His mind was occupied in resolving this difficulty when a revelation from heaven whispered into the ear of his heart, saying, This old and perverted sinner often implored his idol, and his supplications were disregarded; but were he to quit the threshold of my tribunal disappointed, then where would be the difference between a dumb and perishable idol, and the Lord God Eternal? It behoves you, O my beloved! to put your trust in Providence, for any thing besides him is more helpless than a stock or stone image: were you to lay your head at this door, it would be cruel to send you away balked of your object." Of stories like these, and all equally new in Europe, I could furnish you with a more curious variety than Æsop and Phædrus did the Greeks and Romans; but your readers may think they have more than enough, and for the present I shall subscribe myself Yours, GULCHIN. AN INQUIRY into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology. By R. P. KNIGHT. PART IX. [Concluded from No. LII. p. 279.] 209. BUT what contributed most of all towards peopling the coasts and islands both of the Mediterranean and adjoining ocean, with illustrious fugitives of that memorable period, was the practice of ancient navigators in giving the names of their gods and heroes to the lands which they discovered, in the same manner as the moderns do those of their saints and martyrs: for in those early ages every name thus given became the subject of a fable, because the name continued when those who gave it were forgotten. In modern times every navigator keeps a journal; which, if it contains any new or important information, is printed and made public; so that, when a succeeding navigator finds any traces of European language or manners in a remote country, he knows from whence they came: but, had there been no narratives left by the first modern dicoverers, and subsequent adventurers had found the name of St. Francis or St. Anthony with some faint traces of Christianity in any of the islands of the Pacific Ocean, they might have concluded, or at least conjectured, that those saints had actually been there: whence the first convent of monks, that arose in a colony, would soon make out a complete history of their arrival and abode there; the hardships which they endured, the miracles which they wrought, and the relics which they left for the edification of the faithful and the emolument of their teachers. 210. As the heroes of the Iliad were as familiar to the Greek navigators, as the saints of the Calendar were to the Spanish and Portuguese, and treated by them with the same sort of respect and veneration, there can be little doubt that they left the same sort of memorials of them, wherever they made discoveries or piratical settlements; which memorials, being afterwards found among barbarous natious by succeeding navigators, when the discoverers were forgotten and the settlers vanished, they concluded that those heroes had actually been there: and as the works of the Greek poets, by the general diffusion of the Greek language after the Macedonian conquest, became universally known and admired, those nations themselves eagerly cooperated in the deception by ingrafting the Greek fables upon their own, and greedily catching at any links of affinity which might connect them with a people, from whom all that was excellent in art, literature, and society, seemed to be derived. 211. Hence, in almost every country bordering upon the Mediterranean Sea, and even in some upon the Atlantic Ocean, traces were to be found of the navigations and adventures of Ulysses, Menelaus, Æneas, or some other wandering chieftain of that age; by which means such darkness and confusion have been spread over their history, that an ingenious writer, not usually given to doubt, has lately questioned their existence; not recollecting that he might upon the same grounds have questioned the existence of the Apostles, and thus undermined the very fabric which he professed to support: for by quoting, as of equal authority, all the histories which have been written concerning them in various parts of Christendom during seventeen hundred years, he would have produced a medley of inconsistent facts, which, taken collectively, would have startled even his own well-disciplined faith.' Yet this is what he calls a fair 1 Metrodorus of Lampsacus anciently turned both the Homeric poems into Allegory; and the Christian divines of the third and fourth centuries did the same by the historical books of the New Testament; as their predecessors the eclectic Jews had before done by those of the Old. Metrodorus and his followers, however, never denied nor even questioned the general fact of the siege of Troy, (as they have been mis-stated to have done) any more than Tatian and Origen did the incarnation of their Redeemer, or Aristeas and Philo the passage of the Red Sea. Tasso in his later days declared the whole of his Jerusalem Delivered to be an allegory; but without, however, questioning the historical truth of the crusades. mode of analysing ancient profane history; and, indeed, it is much fairer than that which he has practised: for not content with quoting Homer and Tzetzes, as of equal authority, he has entirely rejected the testimony of Thucydides in his account of the ancient population of Greece; and received in its stead that of Cedrenus, Syncellus, and the other monkish writers of the lower ages, who compiled the Paschal and Nuremberg Chronicles. It is rather hard upon our countrymen. Chaucer and Lydgate to be excluded; as the latter would have furnished an account of the good king Priam's founding a chauntry in Troy to sing requiems for the soul of his pious son Hector, with many other curious particulars equally unknown to the antiquaries of Athens and Alexandria, though full as authentic as those which he has collected with so much labor from the Byzantine luminaries of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.1 212. A conclusion directly contrary to that of this ingenious gentleman was drawn by several learned writers of antiquity, from the confusion in which the traditions of early times were involved: instead of turning history into mythology, they turned mythology into history; and inferred that, because some of the objects of public worship had been mortal men, they had all been equally so; for which purpose, they rejected the authority of the mysteries; where the various gradations of gods, dæmons, and heroes, with all the metaphysical distinctions of emanated, personified, and canonised beings, were taught; and instead of them, brought out the old allegorical genealogies in a new dress, under pretence of their having been transcribed from authentic historical monuments of extreme antiquity found in some remote country. 213. Euhemerus, a Messenian employed under Cassander king of Macedonia, seems to have been the first who attempted this kind of fraud. Having been sent into the Eastern Ocean with some commission, he pretended to have found engraven upon a column in an ancient temple in the island of Panchæa, a genealogical account of a family, that had once reigned there; in which were comprised the principal deities then worshipped by the Greeks.3 The theory, which he formed from this pre I See Bryant on Ancient Mythology. 2 Περι μεν ουν των μυστικών, εν οἷς τας μεγίστας εμφάσεις και διαφάσεις λαβειν εστι της περι δαιμονων αληθείας, ευστομα μοι κείσθω, καθ' Ηρόδοτον. Plutarch. de Orac. Defect. p. 417. 3 Euseb. Præp. Evang. lib. ii. c. 2. —Μεγαλας μεν τῳ αθεῷ λεῳ κλισιάδας ανοιγοντας, και εξανθρωπίζοντι τα θεια, λαμπραν δε τοις Ευημερού του Μεσσηνιου φενακισμοις παρρησίαν δίδοντας, ός αυτός αντιγραφα συνθεις 1 |