The National Quarterly Review Volume 2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1861 Excerpt: ... of Alexander, who had the advantage of the best teachers that Greece could afford, including the great Stagyrite himself? Let us remember that it was Cyrus, and not Alexander, or any other monarch since his time, who declared that "It is the duty of a king to work, that his people may live in safety and quiet; to charge himself with anxieties and cares, that they may be exempted from them; to choose whatever is salutary for them, and to reject whatever is hurtful and prejudicial; to place his delight in seeing them increase and multiply, and valiantly oppose his own person for their defense and protection. This is the natural idea and just image of a king." This language was spoken five hundred years before the Christian era, when it does not appear that the ancestors of the French, Germans, or English, if, indeed, they had yet sallied forth in search of booty, from the mountains of Asia, had any system that could with any propriety be called a government, not to speak of a civilization or literature; and was it not worthy of a disciple of Zoroaster, who, five hundred years earlier still, announced that "When in doubt whether an action be good or bad, we should abstain from it?" This might seem irrelevant to our subject, were it not that even law, medicine, and most of the sciences, as well as history, are treated of in poetry by the Persians. Thus, the Shah-Nameh, of Ferdusi, the Persian Homer, embraces a series of narratives in the finest poetry, giving the history of the country for more than three thousand years. This poem contains sixty thousand couplets, and, although written so early as the middle of the tenth century, its language is the purest and most beautiful specimen of the classic Parsee dialect. The history of this epic, ...