yle and sense. 3. Historia
compendiosa Dynastiarum a Gregorio Abulpharagio, interprete Edwardo
Pocockio, in 4to., Oxon. 1663. More useful for the literary than the
civil history of the East. 4. Abulfedoe Annales Moslemici ad Ann.
Hegiroe ccccvi. a Jo. Jac. Reiske, in 4to., Lipsioe, 1754. The best of
our chronicles, both for the original and version, yet how far below the
name of Abulfeda! We know that he wrote at Hamah in the xivth century.
The three former were Christians of the xth, xiith, and xiiith
centuries; the two first, natives of Egypt; a Melchite patriarch, and a
Jacobite scribe.]

[Footnote 14: M. D. Guignes (Hist. des Huns, tom. i. pref. p. xix. xx.)
has characterized, with truth and knowledge, the two sorts of Arabian
historians--the dry annalist, and the tumid and flowery orator.]

[Footnote 15: Bibliotheque Orientale, par M. D'Herbelot, in folio,
Paris, 1697. For the character of the respectable author, consult his
friend Thevenot, (Voyages du Levant, part i. chap. 1.) His work is an
agreeable miscellany, which must gratify every taste; but I never can
digest the alphabetical order; and I find him more satisfactory in the
Persian than the Arabic history. The recent supplement from the papers
of Mm. Visdelou, and Galland, (in folio, La Haye, 1779,) is of a
different cast, a medley of tales, proverbs, and Chinese antiquities.]

I. In the first year of the first caliph, his lieutenant Caled, the
Sword of God, and the scourge of the infidels, advanced to the banks of
the Euphrates, and reduced the cities of Anbar and Hira. Westward of the
ruins of Babylon, a tribe of sedentary Arabs had fixed themselves on the
verge of the desert; and Hira was the seat of a race of kings who had
embraced the Christian religion, and reigned above six hundred years
under the shadow of the throne of Persia. [16] The last of the Mondars
[1611] was defeated and slain by Caled; his son was sent a captive to
Medina; his nobles bowed before the successor of the prophet; the people
was tempted by the example and success of their countrymen; and the
caliph accepted as the first-fruits of foreign conquest an annual
tribute of seventy thousand pieces of gold. The conquerors, and even
their historians, were astonished by the dawn of their future greatness:
"In the same year," says Elmacin, "Caled fought many signal battles: an
immense multitude of the infidels was slaughtered; and spoils infinite
and innumerable were acquired by the vic