Ark, p. 225.]—Ark is obviously, Arx.
Impress, p. 225.]—This impress was by no means peculiar 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 “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 Elizabeth, 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 Dowlah had a female guard of Calmucks, Tartars, Georgians, Negroes and Abyssinians. (Seir Mutagherin, vol. i. p. 146.) Nassureddeen 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. 54: at the end of Byshe’s “Palladius de Gentibus Indiæ,” 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 Virgilianæ 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 I. and Lord Falkland sufficiently proves: Johnson’s Life of Cowley, p. 13. Even the Bible was thus opened for divination. Ars Magica, 1638, p. iii.
Rags on Bushes, p. 230.]—This superstition was noticed in Persia by one of the earliest travellers, Josaphat Barbaro, 1474, fol. 45, and was explained by him on the principle that (such was the scarcity of wood in the country) even a bush was a miracle. M. I.
Change of Names, p. 230.]—The renaming of Shah Seffi, who then became Shah Soleyman, is related fully by Chardin and Tavernier; and in its ceremonies is not perhaps easily paralleled; but in its essential circumstance, a change of name from a belief in the unluckiness of the first, it may be supported by an example in our own history: when John of Scotland took the name of Robert III. (see Henry’s History, vol. viii. 372, from Fordun;) because the Prince, who had borne the former appellation, had been unfortunate in the annals of the country. In the family of Catherine de Medicis; Edward-Alexander became Henry III.: Hercules became Charles IX. &c. See a note in the Life of Cary, Earl of Monmouth, p. 39. The Jews thus changed their names.