Persians should be specially interesting to us. For in them first does
our race, the Aryan race, appear in authentic history. In them first did
our race give promise of being the conquering and civilising race of the
future world. And to the conquests of Cyrus--so strangely are all great
times and great movements of the human family linked to each other--to
his conquests, humanly speaking, is owing the fact that you are here, and
I am speaking to you at this moment.

It is an oft-told story: but so grand a one that I must sketch it for
you, however clumsily, once more.

In that mountain province called Farsistan, north-east of what we now
call Persia, the dwelling-place of the Persians, there dwelt, in the
sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, a hardy tribe, of the purest
blood of Iran, a branch of the same race as the Celtic, Teutonic, Greek,
and Hindoo, and speaking a tongue akin to theirs. They had wandered
thither, say their legends, out of the far north-east, from off some
lofty plateau of Central Asia, driven out by the increasing cold, which
left them but two mouths of summer to ten of winter.

They despised at first--would that they had despised always!--the
luxurious life of the dwellers in the plains, and the effeminate customs
of the Medes--a branch of their own race who had conquered and
intermarried with the Turanian, or Finnish tribes; and adopted much of
their creed, as well as of their morals, throughout their vast but short-
lived Median Empire. "Soft countries," said Cyrus himself--so runs the
tale--"gave birth to small men. No region produced at once delightful
fruits and men of a war-like spirit." Letters were to them, probably,
then unknown. They borrowed them in after years, as they borrowed their
art, from Babylonians, Assyrians, and other Semitic nations whom they