of its author, Zarathustra, is not yet changed in Syriac into the modern Zerdusht. While this intellectual stream, principally flowing through Semitic channels, was irrigating and inundating the west of Asia, the Persian language had been left without literary cultivation. Need we wonder, then, that the men, who at the rising of a new national dynasty (226) became the reformers, teachers, and prophets of Persia, should have formed their language and the whole train of their ideas on a Semitic model. Motley as their language may appear to a Persian scholar fresh from the Avesta or from Firdusi, there is hardly a language of modern Europe which, if closely sifted, would not produce the same impression on a scholar accustomed only to the pure idiom of Homer, Cicero, Ulfilas, or Cædmon. Moreover; the soul of the Sassanian language--I mean its grammar--is Persian and nothing but Persian; and though meagre when compared with the grammar of the Avesta, it is richer in forms than the later Parsi, the Deri, or the language of Firdusi. The supposition (once maintained) that Pehlevi was the dialect of the western provinces of Persia is no longer necessary. As well might we imagine, (it is Spiegel's apposite remark,) that a Turkish work, because it is full of Arabic words, could only have been written on the frontiers of Arabia. We may safely consider the Huzvaresh of the translations of the Avesta as the language of the Sassanian court and hierarchy. Works also like the Bundehesh and Minokhired belong by language and thought to the same period of mystic incubation, when India and Egypt, Babylonia and Greece, were sitting together and gossiping like crazy old women, chattering with toothless gums and silly brains about the dreams and joys of their youth, yet unable to recall one single thought or feeling with that vigour which once gave it life and truth. It was a period of religious and metaphysical delirium, when everything became everything, when Mâyâ and Sophia, Mitra and Christ, Viraf and Isaiah, Belus, Zarvan, and Kronos were mixed up in one jumbled system of inane speculation, from which at last the East was delivered by the positive doctrines of Mohammed, the West by the pure Christianity of the Teutonic nations.