e figures used as
columns.

PERSIANS, THE, belonged to the Aryan race, hence Iran, the original
name of their country; they were related rather to the Western than the
Eastern world, and it is from them that continuous history takes its
start; they first recognised an ethereal essence, which they called
Light, as the principle of all good, and man as related to it in such a
way that, by the worship of it, he became assimilated to it himself.
Among them first the individual subject stood face to face with a
universal object, and claimed a kinship with it as the light of life. The
epoch thus created was the emancipation of the human being from dependent
childhood to self-dependent manhood, and it constituted the first epoch
in the self-conscious history, which is the history proper, of the human
race. The idea the Persians formed of the principle of good came far
short of the reality indeed, but they first saw that it was of purely
illuminating quality and universal, and that the destiny of man was to
relate himself to it, to know, worship, and obey it. With the ethereal
principle of good they associated an equally ethereal principle of evil,
and, as they identified the one with light, they identified the other
with darkness. Man they regarded as related to both, and his destiny to
adore the one and disown the other as master. As the light had no portion
in the darkness, and the darkness no portion in the light, the religion
arose which pervades that of the Bible, which requires the children of
the former to separate from those of the latter.

PERSIFLAGE, a French term for a light, quizzing mockery, or
scoffing, specially on serious subjects, out of a cool, callous contempt
for them.

PERSIGNY, FIALIN, DUC DE, a French statesman, a supporter all along
of Louis Napoleon, abetting him in all his efforts to attain the throne
of France, from the affair of Strasburg in 1836 to the _coup d'etat_ of
December 1851, and becoming in the end Minister of the Interior under
him; had to leave France at his fall (1806-1872).

PERSIUS, the last king of Macedonia; was conquered by Paulus
AEmilius, and died captive at Rome 167 B.C.

PERSIUS, Roman satirist, born in Etruria, was a pupil and friend of
Cornutus the Stoic; a man much esteemed, who died young, only 28; wrote
six short satires in the purity of a white-souled manhood, of much native
vigour, though not equal to those of Horace and Juvenal, and that have
commanded t