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c INTRODUCTION.
gentlemen whose names are mentioned in several foot
notes as having furnished me with information ; and to
Mr. William Foster, the late Secretary of this Society, my
special gratitude is due for his careful revision of the proof-
I
sheets, and for many valuable suggestions and contributions
to the footnotes.
D. F. ‘
Captain John Stevens’s Preface to
his Translation of Pedro1 Teixeira’s “ Kings of
Persia'* and “ Kings of Harmuz ;”2 including
the Author’s Preface to his whole
work.
i
ERSIA is at this time, and has been for
I
several Ages, one of the Great Eastern
Monarchies, and yet the Accounts we
have hitherto had of it in English have
been no better than Fragments.3 Several
Travellers have described the Country,
I and given us the Lives of some of their latter Kings ;
the Turkish History4 here and there has something of
them occasionally ; other Books make mention of the
Conquests of it by the Tartars and the Sarasens. A com-
pleat History of that Kingdom from its Foundation to this
1 Stevens’s title-page says “Antony” by mistake.
2 Stevens’s translation of the Kings was primed in London “ for
Jonas Brown at the Black Swan without Temple-Bar. MDCCXV.’*
That of the Voyage was a separate publication altogether, and is
dealt with in its place. But Stevens’s Preface, and his translation of
the author’s, are here given verbatim, as a fair sample of his work.
3 A list of the various writers on Persia is given in Curzon’s Persia
)
and the Persian Question (London, 1892), vol. I, chap, i, pp. 16-18.
—D. F.
4 Stevens probably refers to Richard Knolles’s Generali Historic of
the Turkes, first published in 1603, and reissued, with additions, in
1610, 1621, 1631, 1638, 1687, 1700, and 1701.- L>. F.
