Let us now pour our acknowledgments on God Almighty’s threshold, for his having vouchsafed on us His divine assistance; and let us praise His goodness endlessly, for his having conde­scended to make use of so humble and so inadequate an instru­ment, as this penman (who is the last of men), to array this third volume in the robes of style and arrangement, and to attire it with the ornament of completion and finishing, in such a manner as to promise these fragile leaves the permanency which was hoped for, and intended for them. Praise be to Him! that in the composition of this Work, exactitude and impartiality have been, to the best of my abilities, objects of scrupulous attention; and that they afford the satisfaction to think that the labour attending such a performance, has been brought to a proper end. I rely so far on the goodness of that Omnipotent Being, as to hope that He shall vouchsafe to irradiate these humble leaves in such a manner, as shall render them capable of illuming the hearts, and of enlightening the understandings, of the ruling men of this age, by giving to the unadequate and feeble ink of this humblest of men all the qualities of a Collyrium, capable of deterging the eyes of men of knowledge. May His beneficence bestow such an efficacy, and such a currency, on the paradisical maxims, sprinkled on every part of this composition, as may render them wholesome and savoury, like those waters said to flow from Heaven, and equally salutary and palatable to the governing part of mankind! May they serve to cleanse their eyes of those immondices, so capable to cloud their lustre, and so proper to keep them closed with the pride of sloth, and slumbering with the intoxicating fumes of power and dominion! For the utmost wish of my ambition, and the direct scope of my steering, have been to reclaim and to awaken those slothful men, who, forgetful of their ownselves, seem to slumber their lives away in the lap of inerty and the blindness of ignorance. When­ever that end is accomplished, I shall presume that this book, teeming with blemishes as it is, has been the means of attract­ing the Divine forgiveness upon my unworthy self. In one word, I firmly hope from the Supreme goodness, that in the verification of the holy oracle, “My mercy goes faster than my anger,” and in compliance with that holy sentence, “He is truth itself,” He shall vouchsafe to convert the fond hope of so sinful a being into completion and reality; for “He is truth itself, and the Supreme Goodness.”

This has been written by the weak and decayed hand of the poorest of those that beg at the gate of the All-bountiful God, that is, by Gh8lam-hussëin, the Hussëinian, son to Seyd Hedaïet-aaly-qhan, grandson to Sëyd Aalim-ollah, great-grand­son to Seyd Faiz-ollah, the Tebatebä, (on whom all may grace and mercy rest for ever!) through the merits of the Prince of Prophets, and the intercession of the last of Messengers, Mohammed, the seal of envoys, as well as through those of his pure and inno­cent offspring (on whom all may grace and mercy rest for ever till the day of the last Judgment!). And the work has been finished the third day of the second week of that blessed month of Ramazan, which comes the seventh in order, in the series that compose the ninety-fifth year of the twelfth century that has elapsed since the auspicious and prophetic flight of that noble being,—on whom be grace and praise for ever!

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Mohammed-bassäon, the Hossënian.