or, as the name is variously written, Ferdousi or Ferdousi, Abul-Casim Mansour, a celebrated Persian poet, was born at Shadab in Khorassan. The date of his birth is not very well known, but from the internal evidence of the Shah Nameh may be assigned approximately to the year 930. His father was a gardener in the service of a wealthy Persian, and from the name of the spot which he cultivated (Firdus or Ferdus, i.e. Paradise) it is believed that the young poet derived his name. Ferdusi had already passed the prime of life when he left his native village for the court of the Sultan Mahmoud, who at that time lived in the city of Ghazna. Chancing to fall upon an old history of Persia, he perused with the utmost eagerness the old legends of the early wars of that country; and by the advice of Mahmoud he began a complete poetical history of the Persian kings. For thirty years he laboured at this work, encouraged by the sultan, who promised him a thousand pieces of gold for every compleat. At the end of that period, however, he was doomed to be cruelly disappointed. Some of the courtiers had taken umbrage at the severity with which he satirized their intrigues, and had poisoned the mind of Mahmoud against him, so that instead of keeping his promise, that monarch rewarded the poet with silver pieces instead of gold. Enraged at this meanness, Ferdusi quitted the court, leaving behind him a manuscript which he requested should be read to the sultan the first time he felt himself exhausted with fatigue or out of temper. The document in question was a satire on his majesty, which so irritated the monarch, that he persecuted the poet during the remainder of his life, and compelled him to wander from country to country till his death. He first took refuge at Mazanderan. Driven thence he fled to Baghdad, the caliph of which city presented him with a reward equal to that which he ought to have received from the Sultan Mahmoud. But the emissaries of that potentate still continued to persecute him, till a pardon was with difficulty extorted from their master, and the ill-starred poet returned to his native town, where he died in 1020, in the eighty-ninth year of his age. Ferdusi's great work, the Shah Nameh, which is a history of the Persian monarchy from its foundation till the year 641 A.D., is of little value in an historical point of view, except in so far as it preserves many of the old traditions of the country. As a poem, however, it still holds a very high place in Oriental literature. This perpetuity of fame is due in an equal degree to the intrinsic poetical merits of the work and the purity of the Persian in which it is written. It is said that no work in the Persian language is so free from foreign admixture as the Shah Nameh. No complete copy of the work is known to exist. Several collations of numerous MSS. have been made, though unsuccessfully, with a view to making up a complete text. Of these may be mentioned that made by Dr Lumsden, of which only a part has been published; and that of Mr Macan, published at Calcutta in 1829, in 4 vols. 8vo. An abridgment of the Shah Nameh in prose and verse was published by Mr James Atkinson, London, 1833.