D.), a period of more than five centuries is almost a blank in the Persian history; but when the last-mentioned king, the regenerator of the ancient Iranian monarchy, wishing to restore its laws and literature, convoked the Mobeds, he found forty thousand of them before the gate of the fire-temple of Barpa.[63] Ammianus Marcellinus, in the fourth century of our era attests, that the title of king was in _Deri_, “court-language,” yet the Pehlevi was spoken concurrently with it during the reigns of the first twelve Sassanian princes, until it was proscribed by a formal edict of the thirteenth of them, _Bahram gor_, in our fifth century. Nushirvan and Parviz, in the sixth century, were both celebrated for the protection which they granted to arts and sciences. We have on record a school of physic, poetry, rhetoric, dialectics, and abstract sciences, flourishing at Gandi sapor, a town in Khorasan: the Persian must have then been highly cultivated. We are now in the times of Muhammed; were they not _Persian_, those Tales, the charm of which, whether in the original or in the translation, was such, that the Arabian legislator, to counteract it, summoned up the power of his high-sounding heaven-inspired eloquence, and wrote a part of the Koran against them? If he himself had not named the Deri as the purest dialect of the Persian, what other language could we believe he admired for its extreme softness so much as to say, that the Almighty used it when he wished to address the angels in a tone of mildness and beneficence, whilst he reserved the Arabic for command?[64] Such a fact, or such a tradition, presupposes a refined, and therefore long-spoken language. After Muhammed’s death, his fanatic successors attempted to bury under the ruins of the Persian empire even the memory of its ancient religion and language――but they did not succeed: the sacred fire was saved and preserved beyond the Oxus; it was rekindled in Baktria, that ancient hearth of Persian splendor; there poetry and eloquence revived, but could not raise their voices until princes of Persian origin became lieutenants of the Mohammedan khalifs. It was under Nasr, son of Ahmed the Samanian, in the beginning of our tenth century, that RUDIGI rose, the first celebrated new Persian poet, but he found, he did not create the language, more than Homer created Greek, Dante Italian, or Spenser English. A great author, in whom the genius of his nation is concentrated, does no more than aptly collect into a whole the idiom which exists every where in parts, and elicit its pre-existing resources. Thus under his pen the language can appear to spring up with all its beauties――as Minerva, equipped in armour, sprung forth from the head of Jupiter.