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of that sublime, but poetical, theology, which glows and sparkles in the writings of the old academics. Plato travelled into Italy and Egypt, says Claude Fleury, to learn the theology of the Pagans at its fountain head:' its true fountain, however, was neither in Italy nor in Egypt, (though considerable streams ⚫ of it had been conducted thither by Pythagoras, and by the family of Misra) but in Persia or India, which the founder of the 'Italic sect had visited with a similar design. What the Grecian travellers learned among the sages of the east, may perhaps be fully explained in another dissertation; but we confine this essay to a singular species of poetry, which consists almost wholly of a mystical religious allegory, though it seems, on a transient view, to contain only the sentiments of a wild and voluptuous libertinism: now, admitting the danger of a poetical style, in which the limits between vice and • enthusiasm are so minute as to be hardly distinguishable, we must allow it to be natural, though a warm imagination may carry it to 'a culpable excess; for an ardently grateful piety is congenial to the undepraved nature of man, whose mind, sinking under the magni'tude of the subject, and struggling to express its motions, has recourse to metaphors and allegories, which it sometimes extends beyond the bounds of cool reason, and often to the • brink of absurdity.'

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The author here gives some considerable extracts from Barrow on the love of God, and

the mysterious union and communion of the soul with him, which he thinks border on quietism and enthusiastic devotion'; and then adds, that these differ only from the mysti'cal theology of the Sufis and Yogis, as the flowers and fruits of Europe differ in scent and flavour from those of Asia; or as European differs from Asiatic eloquence; the same strain, in poetical measure, would rise up to the odes of Spencer on divine love and beauty; and in a higher key, with richer em*bellishments, to the songs of Hafiz and Jayadéva, the raptures of the Masnavi, and the 'Mysteries of the Bhagavat.'

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Sir W. Jones gives another considerable extract on the same subject, taken from M. Necker, in which he represents God as thus addressing man: Your nature is composed ' of those divine particles, which, at an infi'nite distance, constitute my own essence. This, Sir W. says, is the exact system of the Sufis and Vedantis in epitome. They believe that the Deity pervades the universe; that he alone is perfect benevolence, truth and beauty that all the beauties of nature are faint resemblances only, like images in a mirror, of the divine charms;'-' that we must beware of attachment to such phantoms, ' and attach ourselves exclusively to God, who truly exists in us, as we exist solely in him; that we retain, even in this forlorn state of separation from our Beloved, the idea of heavenly beauty, and the remembrance of our primeval vows; that sweet music, gentle N

breezes, fragrant flowers, perpetually renew the primary idea, refresh our fading memory, ' and melt us with tender affections; that we ⚫ must cherish those affections, and by abstracting our souls from vanity, that is, from all but God, approximate to his essence, in our final ' union with which will consist our supreme be'atitude. From these principles flow a thousand 'metaphors and poetical figures, which abound in the sacred poems of the Persians and Hindus, who seem to mean the same thing in substance, and differ only in expression, as their languages differ in idiom. The mo'dern Sufis, who profess a belief in the Koran, suppose, with great sublimity both of thought and of diction, an express contract, on the day of eternity without beginning, between 'the assemblage of created. spirits and the Supreme Soul, from which they were detached, when a celestial voice pronounced these words, addressed to each spirit separately, Art thou not with thy Lord?' that is, Art thou not bound by a solemn contract with him and all the spirits answered with one voice, Yes:' hence it is, that alist, or art thou not, and beli, or yes, incessantly occur ' in the mystical verses of the Persians, and of the Turkish poets, who imitate them, as the Romans imitated the Greeks. The Hindus describe the same covenant under the figurative notion, so finely expressed by Isaiah, of a nuptial contract; for, considering God in the three characters of creator, regenerator, and preserver, and supposing the power of preser⚫vation and benevolence to have become incar

nate in the person of Crishna, they represent ' him as married to Radha, a word signifying ' atonement, pacification, or satisfaction; but applied allegorically to the soul of man, or rather 'to the whole assemblage of created souls; between whom and the benevolent Creator they suppose that reciprocal love, which Barrow describes with a glow of expression perfectly oriental; and which our most or'thodox theologians believe to have been mys'tically shadowed in the song of Solomon, while they admit that, in a literal sense, it is an epithalamium on the marriage of the sapient king with the princess of Egypt. The very 'learned author of the Prelectiones on sacred ' poetry declared his opinion, that the Canticles 'were founded on historical truth, but involved an allegory of that sort, which he named 'mystical; and the beautiful poem on the 'loves of Laili and Majnum, by the inimitable 'Nizami (to say nothing of other poems on 'the same subject) is indisputably built on true history, yet avowedly allegorical and mys'terious, for the introduction to it is a conti'nued rapture on divine love; and the name of 'Laili seems to be used in the Masnavi and the' 'odes of Hafiz, for the omnipresent spirit of

• God.'

As to Hafiz, our truly learned author obServes, it has been made a question whether the poems of Hafiz must be taken in a literal or in a figurative sense; but the question does not admit of a general and direct answer; for ' even the most enthusiastic of his commenta

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⚫tors allow, that some of them are to be taken literally; and his editors ought to have distinguished them, as our Spencer has distinguished his four odes on Love and Beauty; ' instead of mixing the profane with the divine, by a childish arrangement according to the alphabetical order of the rhymes.'-'Many ' zealous admirers of Hafiz,' Sir William adds, insist, that by wine he invariably means devotion-by kisses and embraces the raptures of piety,' &c. &c. The poet himself,' he subjoins, gives a colour in many passages to such an interpretation; and without it we can hardly conceive, that his poems, or those of his numerous imitators, would be tolerated in a Musselman country, especially at Constantinople, where they are venerated as divine 'compositions: it must be admitted, that the sublimity of the mystical allegory, which like metaphors and comparisons should be general only, not minutely exact, is diminished, if not destroyed, by an attempt at parIticular and distinct resemblances; and that the style is open to dangerous misinterpretation, while it supplies real infidels with a pretext for laughing at religion itself.'

The learned president here introduces an ode of the above nature by an ancient Sufi, surnamed Ismat, in which the mysteries of their religion are disguised under the licentious allegories of love and wine; and, after some farther extracts, concludes this elegant and ingenious essay in the following man

ner.