Frederic Shoberl

“ Indeed, I believe that in no country of the world does the rose grow in such perfection as in Persia; in no country is it so cultivated and prized by the natives. Their gardens and courts are crowded by its plants, their rooms ornamented with vases filled with its gathered bunches, and every bath strewed with the full-blown flowers plucked from the ever-replenished stems. Even the humblest individual, who pays a piece of copper money for a few whiffs of a kallioun, feels a double enjoyment when he finds it stuck with a bud of his dear native tree. ”

“ Living shut up in a harem and being visited by none but females, society never forms their manners; the power of human respect opposes no barrier to their passions, to the vices of their hearts, and to the extravagances of their disposition: the intercourse with women perverts rather than purifies their morals. The mother exclusively superintends the education of her daughter, and faithfully transmits to her defects which were not corrected when she was herself young: virtue and modesty are terms which she never utters in her hearing, for they are terms as unmeaning to the one as to the other. ”

“ The whole of the day is spent in feasting and jollity: towards evening, the damsel makes her appearance enveloped in a long veil of scarlet or crimson silk, and being placed on a horse or mule splendidly caparisoned, is conducted to the habitation of her affianced husband by all her relations, marching in regular order to the sound of the same clamorous band which had escorted the presents. When alighted at the bridegroom's door, the lady is led to her future apartments within the house, accompanied by her female relations and waiting-maids. ”

“ It is true that he used rather too freely those rights which his services gave him; that he spared neither advice nor rebuke; but if it be frequently a crime to tell truth to princes, ought they to punish it by a crime still more heinous? Feth Ali nevertheless has not the reputation of being a tyrant.
The fate of Hadjee Ibrahim verifies the common remark—Confer a favour on a tyrant, and your reward will be death. ”

“ Such was in past ages the general appearance of the temple or palace of Persepolis. The genius of destruction now hovers round this terrace; earthquakes have changed the face of it; the hand of man has assiduously overthrown what they had spared: the eye now discovers nothing but fragments of walls, detached door-ways; columns, partly in ruin; the ground strewed with fragments of shafts, capitals and blocks of marble; while heaps of sand and dust are daily covering more and more of these structures, whose remaining masses astonish the imagination. ”

“ Endowed by nature with keener sensibility than the other sex, and left by the death of a husband in a state of forlorn widowhood, to which they are generally doomed for the rest of their lives, they mourn for many months, paying daily visits to the grave, watering it with their tears, rending their garments, imposing on themselves bodily mortifications, and, in short, setting no bounds to the expression of their sorrow. ”

“ But by what privations, what toil, what anxiety does he not purchase the honour of being the second personage, or rather the first slave, in the empire? No sooner has the favour of the sovereign exalted a subject to the dignity of Itimad-ad-dowlah, no sooner is his utmost ambition gratified, than he becomes a stranger to peace and happiness. ”

“ She familiarizes her with but one idea—that she is one day to belong to an absolute master, whose love she must strive to acquire, not by practising the virtues of her sex and condition, but by the arts of refined coquetry, which, though they may excite passion, are an antidote to true conjugal tenderness, which is founded on mutual esteem and regard. She does not teach her how to become a good wife and mother, or inculcate that modesty and that chaste reserve in all her motions, language, and actions which adorn beauty and embellish plainness ”

“ The privilege given to men of marrying several wives, seems, says Abu Taleb, to arise out of the nature and physical constitution of women, which require temporary separations. The laws of Asia, in permitting polygamy, do justice to the one sex without wronging the other. The honour of the legitimate wife sustains no injury from it; for a female who surrenders her person to a married man is never of superior condition, neither is she admitted into the society of ladies, but treated in the same manner as a kept mistress is in Europe. ”

“ We should imagine, it is true, on considering the number of crimes committed in countries where executions are very frequent, that it could not be accompanied with too many horrors to deter man from guilt, since reason alone is incapable of recalling him to his duty: but the most consummate villain, enduring the horrid torments of a lingering death, ceases to be viewed as such: we forget his crimes, and behold in him only a fellow-creature suffering excruciating agonies. The emotions of the heart are not to be controlled either by reason or circumstances. ”