ok of Herodotus. When Darius advanced
into the Moldavian desert, between the Danube and the Niester, the king
of the Scythians sent him a mouse, a frog, a bird, and five arrows; a
tremendous allegory!]

[Footnote 20: These wars and heroes may be found under their respective
titles, in the Bibliotheque Orientale of D'Herbelot. They have been
celebrated in an epic poem of sixty thousand rhymed couplets, by
Ferdusi, the Homer of Persia. See the history of Nadir Shah, p. 145,
165. The public must lament that Mr. Jones has suspended the pursuit of
Oriental learning. Note: Ferdusi is yet imperfectly known to European
readers. An abstract of the whole poem has been published by Goerres
in German, under the title "das Heldenbuch des Iran." In English, an
abstract with poetical translations, by Mr. Atkinson, has appeared,
under the auspices of the Oriental Fund. But to translate a poet a man
must be a poet. The best account of the poem is in an article by Von
Hammer in the Vienna Jahrbucher, 1820: or perhaps in a masterly article
in Cochrane's Foreign Quarterly Review, No. 1, 1835. A splendid and
critical edition of the whole work has been published by a very learned
English Orientalist, Captain Macan, at the expense of the king of Oude.
As to the number of 60,000 couplets, Captain Macan (Preface, p. 39)
states that he never saw a MS. containing more than 56,685, including
doubtful and spurious passages and episodes.--M. * Note: The later
studies of Sir W. Jones were more in unison with the wishes of the
public, thus expressed by Gibbon.--M.]

[Footnote 21: The Caspian Sea, with its rivers and adjacent tribes,
are laboriously illustrated in the Examen Critique des Historiens
d'Alexandre, which compares the true geography, and the errors produced
by the vanity or ignorance of the Greeks.]

[Footnote 22: The original seat of the nation appears to have been in
the Northwest of China, in the provinces of Chensi and Chansi. Under the
two first dynasties, the principal town was still a movable camp; the
villages were thinly scattered; more land was employed in pasture than
in tillage; the exercise of hunting was ordained to clear the country
from wild beasts; Petcheli (where Pekin stands) was a desert, and the
Southern provinces were peopled with Indian savages. The dynasty of the
Han (before Christ 206) gave the empire its actual form and extent.]

[Footnote 23: The aera of the Chinese monarchy has been variously fixed
from 2952