"It is not in Provence, (Provincia _Romanorum_,) as is commonly said from the derivation of the name--nor yet in Spain, as many suppose, that we are to look for the fatherland of those amusing compositions called _Romances_, which are so eminently useful in these days as affording a resource and occupation to ladies and gentlemen who have nothing to do. It is in distant and far different climes to our own, and in the remote antiquity of long vanished ages:--it is among the people of the East, the Arabs, the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Syrians, that the germ and origin is to be found of this species of fictitious narrative, for which the peculiar genius and poetical temperament of those nations particularly adapt them, and in which they delight to a degree scarcely to be credited. For even their ordinary discourse is interspersed with figurative expressions; and their maxims of theology and philosophy, and above all, of morals and political science, are invariably couched under the guise of allegory or parable. I need not stay to enlarge upon the universal veneration paid throughout the East to the fables of Bidpai or Pilpay, and to Lokman, who is (as may easily be shown) the Esop of the Greeks:--and it is well known that the story of Isfendiyar, and of the daring deeds of the Persian hero Rustan, in love and war,[50] are to this day more popular in those regions than the tales of Hercules, Roland, or Amadis de Gaul, ever were with us. And so decidedly is Asia the parent of these fictions, that we shall find on examination, that nearly all those who in early times distinguished themselves as writers of what are now called romances, were of oriental birth or extraction. Clearchus, a pupil of Aristotle, and the first who attempted any thing of the sort in the Greek language, was a native of Soli in Cilicia:--Jamblichus was a Syrian, as were also Heliodorus and Lucian, the former being of Emessa, the latter of Samosata:--Achilles Tatius was an Alexandrian; and the rule will be found to hold good in other instances, with scarcely a single exception." [Footnote 50: The exploits of these and other paladins of the Kaianian dynasty, the heroic age of Persian history, are now known to us principally through the _Shah-Nameh_ of Ferdousi, a poem bearing date only at the beginning of the eleventh century; but both this and its predecessor, the _Bostan-Nameh_, were founded on ballads and [Greek: rhapsôdiai] of far distant ages, which had escaped the ravages of time and the Mohammedans, and some of which are even now preserved among the ancient tribes of pure Persian descent, in the S.W. provinces of the kingdom. Sir John Malcolm (_History of Persia_, ii. 444, note, 8vo. ed.,) gives an amusing anecdote of the effect produced among his escort by one of these popular chants.]