'Persia and the Persian Question by the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, M.P.' [‎19] (50/714)

INTRODUCTORY
19
Holstein ; to the Capuchin Pere Pacifique de Provins we must
refer for the standpoint of France ; Kaempfer, the Westphalian,
went out to Persia as Secretary to the Embassy sent by Charles XI.
of Sweden. The same, or seventeenth century, is the great era at
once of Persian grandeur and of foreign additions to the literature
of travel. A succession of instructed voyagers, drawn to the
country either by commercial interests or by a taste for explora
tion, succeed each other with great rapidity upon the scene, and
have bequeathed to us, as a record alike of their own industry, and
of the opportunities that were placed at their disposal by a Court
consistently favourable to foreign intercourse, a number of works,
almost monumental in character, dealing with every aspect of the
national life, and enriched with elaborate, if not always accurate,
copper-plate engravings. In their pages we find not merely a
contemporary record of the habits and customs of the Persian
people, and of the pomp and pageantry of the Sefavi kings, but the
first attempt to give a minute and illustrated description of the
great ruins at Persepolis and other places, which already attracted
the concern, while suggesting ludicrous reins to the fancy, of the
literati of Europe. Pietro della Valle, a Roman of good family, and
the husband of a Nestorian lady whom he wedded at Baghdad, but
lost by death while in Persia, though pilloried by Gibbon as
intolerably prolix and vain, is the first in date of this voluminous
school of authors, prolixity and vanity being pardonable vices in a
writer The lowest of the four classes into which East India Company civil servants were divided. A Writer’s duties originally consisted mostly of copying documents and book-keeping. who lifts for our gaze the dim curtains of the past. He is
succeeded by Jean Baptiste Tavernier, the well-known French
jeweller, who included the Court of the Grand Sophy (as the
Persian monarch was then called in Europe from a misadaptation
of the name of the dynasty), as well as that of the Great Mogul,
within the range of his businesslike peregrinations; by Chardin,
darum et venerabile nomen, a French Protestant, and also a
jeweller, who, after writing his magnum opus on Persia, retired in
later life to England, upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,
and died a Knight and Alderman of the City of London ; by
Thevenot and Daulier-Deslandes, also Frenchmen ; by Sanson, a
French Missionary; by Dr. Fryer, surgeon to the East India
Company, who is only less quaint and comical than Herbert; and
by Cornelius Le Brun, the Dutchman, who was always ready with
his measuring rod and pencil, and while freely denouncing the