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It is said that the University of Oxford, in which Oriental learning had never, since the revival of letters, been wholly neglected, was to be the seat of the institution which he contemplated. An endowment was expected from the munificence of the Company; and professors thoroughly competent to interpret Hafiz and Ferdusi were to be engaged in the East.
There are many episodes in the Shah Namah of great beauty, and the power and elegance of its verse are unrivaled. Essedi of Tus is distinguished as having been the master of Ferdusi, and as having aided his illustrious pupil in the completion of his great work. Among many poems which he wrote, the "Dispute between Day and Night" is the most celebrated.
Disappointed at the ingratitude of the Shah, Ferdusi wrote some satirical lines, which soon reached the ear of Mahmud, who, piqued and offended at the freedom of the poet, ordered sixty thousand small pieces of money to be sent to him, instead of the gold which he had promised.
Ferdusi was in the public bath when the money was given to him, and his rage and amazement exceeded all bounds when he found himself thus insulted. He distributed the paltry sum among the attendants of the bath and the slaves who brought it.
The Shah Namah contains the history of the kings of Persia down to the death of the last of the Sassanide race, who was deprived of his kingdom by the invasion of the Arabs during the caliphat of Omar, 636 A.D. The language of Ferdusi may be considered as the purest specimen of the ancient Parsee: Arabic words are seldom introduced.
Togray was a native of Ispahan and contemporary with Ferdusi. He became so celebrated as a writer, that the title of Honor of Writers was given him. He was an alchemist, and wrote a treatise on the philosopher's stone. Moasi, called King of Poets, lived about the middle of the eleventh century. He obtained his title at the court of Ispahan, and rose to high dignity and honor.
Ferdusi having thus prepared his vengeance, quitted the ungrateful court without leave-taking, and was at a safe distance when news reached him that his lines had fully answered their intended purpose. Mahmud had heard and trembled, and too late discovered that he had ruined his own reputation forever.
But when the message arrived, Ferdusi was dead, and his family devoted the whole sum to the benevolent purpose he had intended, the erection of public buildings, and the general improvement of his native village, Tus. He died at the age of eighty.
PERSIAN POETS. The first of Persian poets, the Homer of his country, is Abul Kasim Mansur, called Ferdusi or "Paradise," from the exquisite beauty of his compositions. Mahmud commissioned him to write in his faultless verse a history of the monarchs of Persia, promising that for every thousand couplets he should receive a thousand pieces of gold.
But all these monuments of Persian literature were destroyed by the conquest of Alexander the Great, and by the fury of the Mongols and Arabs. This language, however, has been immortalized by Ferdusi, whose poems contain little of that admixture of Arabic which characterizes the writings of the modern poets of Persia.
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