[Footnote 1: "Ils en ont fait une espèce de paradis, et se sont imaginé que des êtres d'une nature angélique les habitaient."--ALBYROUNI, Traité des Ères, &c.; REINAUD, Géographie d'Aboulféda, Introd. sec. iii. p. ccxxiv. The renown of Ceylon as it reached Europe in the seventeenth century is thus summed up by PURCHAS in _His Pilgrimage_, b.v.c. 18, p. 550:--"The heauens with their dewes, the ayre with a pleasant holesomenesse and fragrant freshnesse, the waters in their many riuers and fountaines, the earth diuersified in aspiring hills, lowly vales, equall and indifferent plaines, filled in her inward chambers with mettalls and jewells, in her outward court and vpper face stored with whole woods of the best cinnamons that the sunne seeth; besides fruits, oranges, lemons, &c. surmounting those of Spaine; fowles and beasts, both tame and wilde (among which is their elephant honoured by a naturall acknowledgement of excellence of all other elephants in the world). These all have conspired and joined in common league to present unto Zeilan the chiefe of worldly treasures and pleasures, with a long and healthfull life in the inhabitants to enjoye them. No marvell, then, if sense and sensualitie have heere stumbled on a paradise."]
[Footnote 2: The fable of the "spicy breezes" said to blow from Arabia and India, is as old as Ctesias; and is eagerly repeated by Pliny? lib. xii. c. 42. The Greeks borrowed the tale from the Hindus, who believe that the _Chandana_ or sandal-wood imparts its odours to the winds; and their poete speak of the Malayan as the westerns did of the Sabæan breezes. But the allusion to such perfumed winds was a trope common to all the discoverers of unknown lands: the companions of Columbus ascribed them to the region of the Antilles; and Verrazani and Sir Walter Raleigh scented them off the coast of Carolina. Milton borrowed from Diodorus Siculus, lib. iii. c. 46, the statement that:
"Far off at sea north-east winds blow Sabæan odours from the spicy shore Of Araby the Blest." (_P.L._ iv. 163.)
Ariosto employs the same imaginative embellishment to describe the charms of Cyprus:
"Serpillo e persa e rose e gigli e croco Spargon dall'odorifero terreno Tanta suavita, ch'in mar sentire La fa ogni vento che da terra spire." (_Oil. Fur._ xviii. 138.)