Page:Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages.djvu/17

 ingrafted upon the principal allegory an episode from the Arabian tales of a thousand and one nights, a copy of which work in Arabick was procured for me by a learned friend at Aleppo.

The song, which follows, was first printed at the end of a Persian grammar; but, for the satis-faction of those who may hare any doubt of its being genuine, it seemed proper to set down the original of it in Roman characters at the bottom of the page. The ode of Petrarch was added, that the reader might compare the manner of the Asiatick poets with that of the Italians, many of whom have written in the true spirit of the Easterns: some of the Persian songs have a striking resemblance to the sonnets of Petrarch; and even the form of those little amatory poems was, I believe, brought into Europe by the Arabians; one would almost imagine the following lines to be translated from the Persian,