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 80 THE DECLINE AND FALL and Mount Caucasus, which, in the language of poetry, was described as the utmost boundary of the earth. They celebrated, with simple credulity, the virtues of the pastoral life.^'^ They entertained a more rational apprehension of the strength and numbers of the warlike Barbarians,i^ who contemptuously baffled the immense armament of Darius, the son of Hystaspes. '^ The Persian monarchs had extended their western conquests to the banks of the Danube and the limits of European Scythia. The eastern provinces of their empire were exposed to the Scythians of Asia : the wild inhabitants of the plains beyond the Oxus and the Jaxartes, two mighty rivers, which direct their course towards the Caspian Sea. The long and memorable quarrel of Iran and Touran is still the theme of history or romance ; the famous, perhaps the fabulous, valour of the Persian heroes, Rustan and Asfendiar, was signalized in the de- fence of their country against the Afrasiabs of th.e North ; -** and the invincible spirit of the same Barbarians resisted, on the same ground, the victorious arms of Cyrus and Alexander.^i In the eyes of the Greeks and Persians, the real geography of Scythia was bounded, on the East, by the mountains of Imaus, or Caf ; and their distant prospect of the extreme and inaccessible parts of Asia was clouded by ignorance or perplexed by fiction. But those inaccessible regions are the ancient residence of a powerful and civilized nation,22 which ascends, by a probable tradition, above 1^ In the thirteenth book of the Iliad Jupiter turns away his eyes from the bloody fields of Troy to the plains of Thrace and Scythia, He would not, by changing the prospect, behold a more peaceful or innocent scene. i^Thucydides, 1. ii. c. 97. 19 See the fourth book of Herodotus. When Darius advanced into the Mol- davian desert, between the Danube and the Dniester, the king of the Scythians sent him a mouse, a frog, a bird, and five arrows ; a tremendous allegory ! 20 These wars and heroes may be found under their respective titles in the Biblioth6que 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. 21 The Caspian Sea, with its rivers and adjacent tribes, are laboriously illustrated in the Examen Critique des Historiens d'Alexandre, wiiich compares the true geography and the errors produced by the vanity or ignorance of the Greeks. -- The original seat of the nation appears to have been in the North-west of China, in the provinces of Chensi and Chansi. Undei the two first dynasties, the principal town was still a moveable 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 Hau (before Christ 206) gave the empire its actual form and extent.