How can we live, so far apart?
Oh! why not rather, heart to heart,
United live and die—
Like those sweet birds, that fly together,
With feather always touching feather,
Linkt by a hook and eye![5]
[1] I have made many inquiries about this Persian gentleman, but cannot satisfactorily ascertain who he is. From his notions of Religious Liberty, however, I conclude that he is an importation of Ministers; and he has arrived just in time to assist the Prince and Mr. Leckie in their new Oriental Plan of Reform.—See the second of these letters.—How Abdallah's epistle to Ispahan found its way into the Twopenny Post-Bag is more than I can pretend to account for.
[2] Sunnites and Shiites are the two leading sects into which the Mahometan world is divided; and they have gone on cursing and persecuting each other, without any intermission, for about eleven hundred years. The Sunni is the established sect in Turkey, and the Shia in Persia; and the differences between them turn chiefly upon those important points, which our pious friend Abdallah, is the true spirit of Shiite Ascendency, reprobates in this Letter.
[3] "In contradistinction to the Sounis, who in their prayers cross their hands on the lower part of the breasts, the Schiahs drop their arms in straight lines; and as the Sounis, at certain periods of the prayer, press their foreheads on the ground or carpet, the Schiahs," etc.—Forster's Voyage.
[4] "The Shiites wear green slippers, which the Sunnites consider as a great abomination."—Mariti.
[5] This will appear strange to an English reader, but it is literally translated from Abdallah's Persian, and the curious bird to which he alludes is the Juftak, of which I find the following account in Richardson:—"A sort of bird, that is said to have but one wing; on the opposite side to which the male has a hook and the female a ring, so that, when they fly, they are fastened together."
LETTER VII.
FROM MESSRS. LACKINGTON AND CO. TO THOMAS MOORE, ESQ.
Per Post, Sir, we send your MS.—look it thro'—
Very sorry—but can't undertake—'twouldn't do.
Clever work, Sir!—would get up prodigiously well—
Its only defect is—it never would sell.
And tho' Statesmen may glory in being unbought,
In an Author 'tis not so desirable thought.
Hard times, Sir, most books are too dear to be read—
Tho' the gold of Good-sense and Wit's small-change are fled,
Yet the paper we Publishers pass, in their stead,
Rises higher each day, and ('tis frightful to think it)
Not even such names as Fitzgerald's can sink it!