He had been wounded to the quick by
the scornful tone adopted by Anquetil towards Hyde and a few other
English scholars: the "Zend-Avesta" suffered for the fault of its
introducer, Zoroaster for Anquetil. In a pamphlet written in French,
with a _verve_ and in a style which showed him to be a good disciple of
Voltaire, William Jones pointed out, and dwelt upon, the oddities and
absurdities with which the so-called sacred books of Zoroaster teemed.
It is true that Anquetil had given full scope to satire by the style he
had adopted: he cared very little for literary elegance, and did not
mind writing Zend and Persian in French; so the new and strange ideas he
had to express looked stranger still in the outlandish garb he gave
them. Yet it was less the style than the ideas that shocked the
contemporary of Voltaire. His main argument was that books, full of such
silly tales, of laws and rules so absurd, of descriptions of gods and
demons so grotesque, could not be the work of a sage like Zoroaster, nor
the code of a religion so much celebrated for its simplicity, wisdom,
and purity. His conclusion was that the "Avesta" was a rhapsody of some
modern Guebre. In fact, the only thing in which Jones succeeded was to
prove in a decisive manner that the ancient Persians were not equal to
the _lumieres_ of the eighteenth century, and that the authors of the
"Avesta" had not read the "Encyclopedie.
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