INTRODUCTION Born on February 7, 1862, Edward Granville Browne came of good English stock, a Gloucestershire family "producing soldiers and business men, with divines and doctors of medicine in former generations," but leaving no record that might seem to anticipate their descendant's genius for Orientalism. His schooldays were less happy than those of most boys, for even then he went his own ways, which could not be fitted into any orthodox system of work and play. Browne was destined for engineering, his father's profession, and accordingly left Eton before he was sixteen. What first turned his thoughts to the East was the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–8; admiration for the bravery of the Turks and disgust with the attempts made in this country "to confound questions of abstract justice with party politics" started him upon the study of the Turkish language. From that day he never looked back. On coming up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1879, though Medicine claimed most of his time, he began to read Arabic with Professor E. H. Palmer and later with Professor William Wright, while Persian (one of the subjects for the Indian Languages Tripos which he took in 1884) was rapidly mastered with the help of "a very learned but very eccentric old Persian," Mírzá Muḥammad Báqir of Bawánát, then living in Limehouse. A visit to Constantinople in 1882, after passing his second examination for the M.B., gave him a glimpse of the promised land; but now it was Persia on which his heart was set. When he went down from Cambridge to work for three years in London hospitals, he found consolation in the poetry of Persian mystics, in the society of Persian friends, and above all in the dream that some day he would make a pilgrimage to Shíráz and Iṣfahán. That dream came true sooner than he had dared to hope. In May, 1887, he was elected Fellow of his College and the way to the East lay open before him. A Year amongst the Persians, published in 1893, reflects his experiences and impressions with extraordinary vividness. Every one knows this fascinating book, in which the inmost spirit of Persia and the Persian people is revealed by a young Englishman who, incomparably beyond any other Western traveller, had absorbed it and made it part of his own feeling and thinking. Hence the book is a revelation of Browne himself; already we see his whole-hearted sympathy with the Oriental mind and, conversely, the fixed point of view from which his judgements on the West were formed and delivered. His falling in with the Bábís, though some readers may have regretted it, was a great piece of luck; for who else could have won their confidence, learned so much about them, and penetrated into the mysteries of their faith as he did? On returning to Cambridge with many precious manu- scripts, he became University Lecturer in Persian, a post which he held till 1902, when he succeeded Charles Rieu as Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic.