Sir John Chardin was born at Paris on the 16th of November, 1643. He was the son of a rich Protestant jeweller, who, as soon as his education, which appears to have been carefully conducted and liberal, was completed, intrusted him with the management of a commercial speculation in the East, and thus at once gratified and influenced the passion for visiting new and remote regions which had already taken possession of the mind of our traveller. Leaving Paris at the age of twenty-two, he visited Hindostan and Persia, where he remained several years, and was appointed merchant to the king. His manly but shrewd character, united with extensive knowledge and great suavity of manners, procured him numerous friends at the court of Ispahan, some of whom filled important offices in the government, and were thus enabled to lay open to him the interior movements of the great political machine which he afterward described with so much vigour and perspicuity. He accompanied the shah on his visits to various portions of his dominions, and in this way was enabled to traverse with pleasure and advantage the wilder and least accessible districts of Persia, such as Mazenderan, Ghilan, and the other provinces bordering on the Caspian Sea. Of this portion of his life, however, he did not judge it necessary to give any detailed account; perhaps because he had afterward occasion to visit the same scenes, when his mind was riper, his views more enlarged, and his powers of observation and description sharpened and invigorated by experience and habit. Returning to France in 1670, he remained fifteen months in the bosom of his family, and employed this period of tranquillity and leisure in the composition of his “History of the Coronation of Solyman III., King of Persia;” a small work usually appended to his account of his travels. The desire of fame and distinction, however, which in youthful and ardent minds is generally the ruling passion, urged him once more to quit his native country, where, as he himself observes, the religion in which he was educated excluded him from all hope of advancement or honours, in order to revisit those regions of the East where his faith would be no bar to his ambition, and where commerce was not thought to degrade even the majesty of kings.