[113] Sir W. J.’s Works, vol. V. pp. 414-415.
[114] Anquetil composed a number of Memoirs, read to the French Institut and preserved in their printed records. He published, in 1771, three quarto volumes upon his voyages to, in, and from India, and the Works of Zoroaster; in 1798, _L’Inde en rapport avec l’Europe; in 1799, La Legislation orientale, ou le despotisme considéré dans la Turquie, la Perse et l’Indostane_. An epistle which he placed before his Latin translation of _Dara Shuko’s Persian Upanishad_, and addressed to the Brahmans of India, contained, as it were, his religious and political testament. He declares his nourishment to have been reduced, like that of an abstemious ascetic, living, even in winter, without fire; and sleeping in a bed without feathers or sheets. His juvenile boast of “personal beauty” was expiated by total neglect of his body, left “with linen unchanged and unwashed;” his aspirations to “a vast extent of learning” had subsided into patient and most persevering studies. But, disdaining to accept gifts and pensions, even from government, he preserved his absolute liberty, and blessed his poverty, “as the salvation of his soul and body, the rampart of morality and of religion; a friend of all men; victorious over the allurements of the world” he tended towards the Supreme Being. Well may virtues so rare efface other human failings of Anquetil du Perron. He died, in his seventy-fourth year, in 1805.――(See _Histoire et Mémoires de l’Institut royal de France. Classe d’Histoire et de Littérature anciennes_, tome III. 1818.)
[120] Yezd, in central Persia, is the ancient Isatichæ of Ptolemy. It is celebrated on account of the fire-worship of _Yezdan_ (or Ormuzd, as light), there practised, and as the last asylum of the adherents to Zoroaster’s religion, who fled before the Muhammedans. From thence thefire-worshippers sought a refuge in India, and settled in Diu, Bombay, and in the higher valleys of the Indus and the Ganges.
[123] For instance, the _Utopia_ of Thomas Moore, the _Oceana_ of Harrington, the _Leviathan_ of Hobbes, etc., etc.
The theatre upon which the author of the Dabistán begins history from the remotest times, is Persia, without limitation of its extent, probably including Chaldæa. From thence he passes to India, he says little of any other country; nothing at all of Egypt. The delta of this most fertile land, as an alluvial formation of the great river Nile, was necessarily posterior to the existence of inland regions; still its claims to antiquity are very high and not unsupported, to a certain extent, by the best written testimonies and architectural monuments. If I here refer in a cursory manner to its eras,[124] it is to strengthen what was above remarked concerning the general belief of the great age of the world. The ancient religion of Egypt, although connected and conformable in many points with other Asiatic religions, is never alluded to by the author of the Dabistán, probably because in his time the Egyptians had lost even the memory of their ancient history, which very little attracted the curiosity of their masters, the Muhammedans, except perhaps by the medium of the Bible of the Jews, often quoted in their Koran.[125]