Such being the historical indications relative to the Persian language, we cannot participate in the doubts of Silvestre de Sacy, nor find Erskine[65] just in disdaining even to make a comment upon the credibility of the hypothesis “that the Persian language was completely formed in the age of the latter Sassanians.” It would be rather a matter of wonder that the Parsi, related to the most ancient and most cultivated language in the world, should not have been much sooner fitted for the harmonious lays of Ferdusi!――a matter of wonder indeed, that the Persians, who taught the Arabs so much of their religion――heaven and hell, should have remained behind them in the refinement of their idiom!――that they, who could scoff at the _Tazis_ as eaters of lizards, should not have possessed, in the seventh century, a language to contend with that people, who themselves possessed celebrated poets long before Muhammed![66] It is for ever regrettable that overpowering Muhammedism should have spoiled the original admirable simplicity of one of the softest languages in the world, by the intrusion of the sonorous but harsher words of Arabic, and imposed upon us the heavy tax of learning two languages for understanding one; but, as the translation of the Desátir is free from words of an Arabic or Chaldean origin, should we not fairly conclude, that it was executed before the Muhammedan conquest of Persia? So did Norris, and so Erskine――I can but think――would have done, if his judgment and penetration, usually so right and acute, had not been prepossessed by the idea of an imposture, which he had assumed as proved or self-evident, whilst this was the very point of contestation. Thus, “the very freedom from words of foreign growth, which the learned natives consider as a mark of authenticity, appeared to him the proof of an artificial and fabricated style.” If even there are some Arabic words to be found in the text and the translation of the Desátir, this affords no fair inference that these works had not been composed before the Arabs conquered Persia, because those words might have come from Pehlevi, in which there is a mixture of Arabic, and there are also Persian words in the Koran; most naturally, as there subsisted from times immemorial relations between Persia and Arabia. What I have said will, if I am not mistaken, sufficiently justify the conclusion, that the Persian idiom could in the seventh century have attained the regularity and form of the present Persian, such at least, as it appears in the Commentary of the Desátir, not without a very perceptible tincture of obsoleteness.