“And Miriam answered them, Sing ye to the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea” (Exod. xv. 20, 21).
[121] The origin of this word shall be explained hereafter.
[122] “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John xii. 24).
[123] We are told—says Sir John Malcolm, in a Persian work of celebrity, the Attash Kuddah—that a person dreamt he saw Ferdosi composing, and an angel was guiding his pen: he looked near, and discovered that he had just written the above couplet, in which he so emphatically pleads for humanity to the smallest insect of the creation.
[124] Another Almoner was an epithet they assigned to God, which even the Brahmins retained after they had seceded from them, as may be seen in Wilkins’ translation of a Sanscrit inscription on a pillar near Buddal, published in the first volume of the Asiatic Researches. This inscription, I must observe, as it escaped that learned Orientalist to perceive it, as it equally did the acumen of the president, his annotator, is, with the column on which it appears, nothing else than a record of the triumphs obtained by a hero of the Brahminical party in exterminating the Budhists. The frequent allusion to the “lustful elephants,”—such as “whose piles of rocks reek with the juice exuding from the heads of intoxicated elephants,”—and “Although the prospect hidden by the dust arising from the multitude of marching force was rendered clear from the earth being watered by constant and abundant streams flowing from the heads of lustful elephants of various breeds,”—and still more that beautiful and pathetic sentiment which occurs in the original of the preceding paper, omitted by Mr. Wilkins, but supplied by the president, viz. “by whom having conquered the earth as far as the ocean, it was left as being unprofitably seized—so he declared; and his elephants weeping saw again in the forests their kindred whose eyes were full of tears,”—make this a demonstration: yet would the beauty of the image be lost to some of my readers, were I not to explain that the Budhists treated with a sort of deified reverence the tribe of elephants, which now bewailed their extermination as above described.
[125] From Bavana was named the village of Banaven, in Scotland, whither some of the Tuath-de-danaans had repaired after their retreat from Ireland—a very appropriate commemoration of their recent subversion; and a particular locality within its district, where St. Patrick was born, was called Nemph-Thur, that is, the holy tower, corresponding to Budh-Nemph, i.e. the holy Lingam, from the circumstance of there having been erected on it one of those temples which time has since effaced. Tor-Boileh upon the Indus, which means the Tower of Baal, is in exact consonance with Nemph-Thur and with Budh-Nemph; and there can be no question but that there also stood one of those edifices, as the ruins even of a city are perceptible in the neighbourhood. Mr. Wilford, however, would translate this last name, Tor-Boileh, by Black Beilam: and, to keep this colour in countenance, he invents a new name for a place called Peleiam, “which,” he says, “appears to have been transposed from Ac Beilam, or the White Beilam, sands or shores and now called ‘Hazren.’” I am not surprised at the discredit brought upon etymology.
[126] And this, too, after he had admitted that “the name is certainly of the pure Iberno-Celtic dialect, and must have had some meaning founded in the nature of things in its original and radical formation.”
[127] All our ancient swords were made of brass.
[128] Gibbon, vol. ii. p. 527, 4to, 1781.
[129] Histoire d’Irelande, vol. i. cap. 7.