The professed writers upon Persia belong all to a recent period; and the magazines which they consulted, for the scanty information which they furnish, were either Arabs or Greeks--the former a body of predatory warriors, whose only insight into letters arose from the opportunities which their rapines had supplied them; and the latter, a community who, insensible to the beauties of moral truth, took delight in distorting even the most commonplace occurrences into the most unnatural incredibilities and misshapen incongruities. But independently of these causes, another more powerful one had before long co-operated. A rival dynasty, starting up from amongst themselves, succeeded, by the issue of a religious revolution, to effect their expulsion; and that once ascertained--the doors of admission ever after closed against their return--the victors were not satisfied with the monopoly of civil power, but they must wreak their vengeance still more, by the erasure of every vestige of the former sway. In this devastating course, the Round Towers, as the temples of their figurative veneration, were particularly obnoxious; and, accordingly, we may be assured, that it was owing to the durability of those edifices, and not to the clemency of the assailants, that any one of them has been able to survive the hurricane. Who, you will ask, were those destroyers? They were the _Pish-de-danaans_. And so energetically did they prosecute their extinguishing plan, aided, besides, by the antiquity of its remote occurrence, that all writers upon that country, before the compilers of the _Dabistan_, have set them down as its first dynasty, making the Kaianians, the Askanians, and the Sassanians, their successors. Here I am obliged, in compliance with the justice of my subject, to expose an error of a gentleman, whom I would rather have overlooked. “The _Tuatha-dadan_ of the Irish,” says Vallancey, “are the _Pish-dadan_ of the Persians”; which he pretends to prove as follows:--“First, then,” says he, “_Tuath_ and _Pish_ are synonymous in the Chaldee, and both signify mystery, sorcery, prophets, etc.; they are both of the same signification in the Irish; therefore by _Pish-dadan_ and _Tuatha-dadan_, I understand the Dadanites, descended of Dedan, who had studied the necromantic art, which sprang from the Chesdim, or Chaldeans.” Of a piece with this was his assertion that _Nuagha Airgiodlamh_ of the Irish, was _Zerdust_ of the Persians! And wherefore, think you, reader? Because, forsooth, _Airgiodlamh_ signifies _silver_-hand, and Zerdust, _gold_-hand! Yes, but he made out another analogy, and it is worth while to hear it, viz. that Nuagha had his _hand cut off_ by a Fir-Bolg _general_; while Zerdust’s _life was taken away_ by a Turanian _chieftain_!!!