to render it yet blacker, as well as to give it gloss, to soften and preserve it, they dye it from time to time with a preparation combining all those effects." The luxurious practices of the harem are not confined to the Persian women, but are adopted to a large and degrading extent by the men of that country. Of this we glean, from the works of various English travellers, evidence which Mr. Flandin fully confirms. The Persians pass much time and endure some suffering in the adornment of their persons. Like the women, they stain their hands and feet, and paint their nails; but it is the beard, and particularly the mustache, that is the object of their anxious care. Old men never wear their beards white; the lower classes, especially in country places, dye it with henna, which gives it a disagreeable orange tint. But most Persians, even though their beard be naturally black, submit themselves every fortnight to a painful process, performed at the bath, in which henna, pomatum, and indigoleaf paste successively figure, and during which the beard passes through as many tints as did the beard of the unfortunate and too confiding Mr. Titmouse. First the henna produces a fine red; this the application of the indigo turns to a dark green, which becomes, in the course of twenty-four hours, the much-desired blue black. During two hours that the patient lies motionless upon his back, his beard anointed with the indigo extract, the corrosive acting of the dye is severely felt by the skin; but a Persian's dandyism and vanity brave the small martyrdom. Then away he goes to enjoy his kief (far-niente) under his tent if the weather be fine; for the Persian, like most Easterns, dearly loves the tent. At Teheran, for six months in the year, the heat is intolerable, spring water there is none, and stagnant pools fill the air with pestilential miasma, engendering fever and other maladies. So, when comes the month of May, all the Teheranese whose daily occupations do not imperatively retain them in the city, betake themselves to the valleys and slopes of the neighbouring mountain of Chimran, where, in delightful gardens, they get under canvass for the summer. There they do a great deal of kief, dabble their hands in water, smoke, and eat innumerable watermelons, and kriars-small cucumbers, of which they are very fond, and which constitute their chief food in summer. No unpleasant life for indolent Orientals, in a delightful climate and in gardens full of the most exquisite fruits, and enlivened by the song of countless birds. In a land where people can live upon cucumbers and fruit - rendered by the great heat more grateful than any other nourishment-a bare subsistence cannot be hard to obtain. Mr. Flandin vaunts the glorious bright-red pomegranates of Persia, twelve and fifteen inches in circumference, whose juice afforded him so delightful a beverage; and tells us of his encampments in apricot orchards, where, on payment of a shilling, his whole caravan was allowed an unlimited consumption of the fragrant fruit. But it is not to be inferred from the Persian's addiction to rural life and vegetable diet, that his character is marked by pastoral simplicity. He is the very incarnation of falsehood and duplicity, and the most skilful of mankind in disguising his thoughts. Xenophon might still say of him that he rides well and is dexterous with the bow, for he is a fine horseman, managing his steed adroitly, and using his arms with ease in his saddle-a kind of address he is fond of displaying at istakbals-and the men of Khorasan still go to battle armed with the weapons that so greatly excited the risibility of Major Dalgetty; but as regards speaking the truth, the leader of the Ten Thousand would have to retract his good opinion, for the Persian of the present day is the greatest liar under the sun. The innate propensity to falsehood is fostered by education and example, until it becomes so strong that he would rather lie than speak the truth, even though nothing were to be gained by it. Engaging in his manners and profuse of promises, he is full of deceit, and morally corrupt to the core. tercourse with him is the more dangerous, because his suavity and courtesy render it agreeable, and put the stranger off his guard. He has a proverb which says that 'Politeness is a coin destined to enrich not him In who receives, but him who expends it." Upon this proverb all classes of Persians act, and never smile more amiably than when planning a robbery or fraud. Bad faith is the rule with them, honesty a very rare exception. Nothing in Persia is ever paid when due, or in full. M. de Sercey soon discovered this. At the Shah's request, the French government had sent a dozen non-commissioned officers to drill his army. The embassy found them at Tabriz, in a state of penury and destitution. Various causes had concurred to prevent their employment. The Russians had no wish to see Persia acquire a really effective army. England, too, according to M. Flandin, who has a strong touch of Anglophobia, and everywhere detects the perfidious finger of British influence, secretly set its face against the improvement of Persian troops. But the main cause was the jealousy of the native officers, who feared a diminution of their importance by the introduction of men really acquainted with the profession of which they were totally ignorant. Their whole idea of soldiering consisted in strutting about in uniforms of Russian fashion, covered with ridiculous decorations. The embassy had been received at the frontier by two officers of cavalry, one of whom had the rank of colonel, although neither appeared to be much more than fourteen years old. They were loaded with long sabres and with huge epaulets, out of all proportion to their diminutive stature; and their little legs were lost in wide trousers and Hessian boots. Infant militaires of this kind might naturally fear a contrast with the experienced French sergeants, who, had knowledge been the rule for advancement, ought doubt less to have been forthwith made into Persian generals, but who, instead of that, were left unemployed, and of course unpaid. The ambassador exerted himself to obtain them their arrears, and received-unlimited promises, but no cash. He had yet to learn the insolvent practices of the country, and how readily Persians promise that which they never mean to perform. As for paying anything, they appear never to dream of such a thing; they are greedy takers, but the worst possible givers. Their avidity for pichkech (gifts) is at once disgusting and laughable. At Teheran, the visits of the governor and of the Turkish and Russian ambassadors were followed by those of a crowd of more or less important persons, who all came in hopes of a share in the presents which it was presumed M. de Sercey could not fail to make. Skilfully as they veiled their mercenary aim, they yet could not wholly conceal it. By the most ingenious and circuitous paths they all at last came to the same conclusion-namely, an assertion of pretended services rendered to the French padishah, and to his ambassador in particular, and an expression of their conviction that the said ambassador would not fail to testify his gratitude: no; his king and his country were too great and munificent for that. The Frenchmen were too much amused to dwell upon the shameless cupidity thus displayed. "The whole of their manoeuvres," says M. Flandin, "were so garnished with compliments, and mingled with adroit flattery and subtle insinuations, that, although penetrating their object, we could not help finding them very amiable. They did not all lose their time; some received silk stuffs, pieces of cloth, watches; others, arms, porcelain, or jewellery. These presents may be said to have been utterly thrown away, but it is customary in Persia thus to purchase one's welcome. One is bound to arrive there with his hands full, and nothing is changed since the time when Chardin said, that to sell one diamond he gave away two. Nor is there likelihood of change, so rooted in the Persian character is the passion for the pichkech— a passion which the increasing poverty of all classes cannot but stimulate." The stay of the French embassy at Teheran lasted but three weeks, the Shah having gone to Ispahan, whither de Sercey followed him. Teheran, although the habitual residence of the sovereign, and looked upon as the capital, is of less real importance than Ispahan and Tabriz. The only interesting part of the city is the Ark, central in position, and surrounded by a fortified wall, and by a ditch crossed by drawbridges. by drawbridges. It comprises the Shah's palace, the dwellings of some princes of the blood and great per sonages of the court, and quarters for part of the royal guard. Within it is also a large square, called the Meidani-Shah or Royal Square, and closed on all sides by walls, flanked by towers provided with artillery. "In the midst of this square is a platform about a yard in height, upon which is an enormous cannon, whose utility in that place it is difficult to understand. Beneath its broken carriage I one day saw a man who begged and invoked Ali. I was told he was a murderer, who had taken refuge there as in a sanctuary. The fugitive who reaches its shelter cannot be touched, however heinous his crime. He there awaits the passage of the king, who cannot refuse his pardon. Thus the impunity of a criminal depends upon his agility. There are other places of asylum, notably the royal mosque." Right of sanctuary, long since abolished in highly-civilised countries as an inconvenient and irrational interference with the proper course of justice, may be indulgently looked upon in a land where, as in Persia, the penal code is a catalogue of the most barbarous tortures man can inflict upon man. Persian perfidy and corruption are only to be equalled by Persian cruelty. To this very day the most atrocious punishments are of common occurrence. It is not two years since the blood of the European public ran cold at the recital contained in every newspaper of that inflicted upon some wretched fanatics charged with high treason. But offences far less grave are almost as severely visited, and of this M. Flandin witnessed numerous examples-as, for instance, a baker thrown into his own oven for dishonest practices with his bread; a butcher nailed by the ear to his own doorpost for a similar offence. Cutting off ears and noses is considered quite a trifling penalty, and in numerous instances the Frenchmen had the greatest difficulty in preventing its application to persons of whose misconduct they had found it necessary to complain to the authorities. But it was at Ispahan that these horrors reached their height. The motive of the Shah's journey thither, or rather of his march at the head of a large body of troops, was to suppress a great insurrection, headed by the chief of the Mollahs, the Mahometan Primate of Persia, whose ambition, importance, and immense wealth, had inspired him with the idea of emancipating himself from the royal authority. He had enlisted under his banner a legion of robbers, assassins, scamps, and lazzaroni, known in Persia under the generic name of loutis. These banditti had driven out the feeble garrison of Ispahan, and had since lived there at free quarters, daily committing every imaginable crime. On the approach of the Shah's army, the greater part of them fled. Some, however, either tardy to escape or bolder than the rest, remained concealed in the city. Search was made for them, they were discovered, and thousands of their victims flocked eagerly to bear witness against them. The women, especially, who had endured outrage at their hands, came in crowds, imploring, with tears in their eyes, permission to cut off the hands and heads of their ravishers. This would have been a mild punishment compared to others that were inflicted on these miserable wretches. Some were thrown upon bayonets, others were buried to the waist, their heads downwards, in a row, their legs in the air, and tied to each other, so as to form what the Persians call gardens of vines. Details still more horrible are given by M. Flandin, who reverts to the subject at a much later period of his travels, when visiting the curiosities of Shiraz. Manoutcher Khan, a Georgian eunuch, remarkable for his energy and cruelty, and who was then governor of Ispahan, had been sent, some years ago, to head an expedition against the robber Mamacenis, whose haunts were in the mountains between Shiraz and Shuster. Having taken a certain number of them prisoners, he hit upon a plan for striking terror into their comrades still at large. In the plain of Shiraz, near one of the gates of the town, he built a tower, in whose walls he left as many niches as there were captives. These were then placed in the recesses and walled up, an opening being left opposite to their faces, that the sufferings they endured might be visible to all who passed. M. Flandin found some remains of skulls and rags of clothing. Whilst stigmatizing the bloodthirsty justice of the East, which insists that the chastisement should at least equal in cruelty the crime it is inflicted for, he yet warns his readers against estimating it by a European standard. "One must have witnessed," he says, "the barbarous nature of those Asiatic races, one must have lived in the midst of those savage and untamed tribes, to understand how necessary it sometimes may be to terrify them by the example of horrible punishments. Terror is salutary, and it can hardly be deemed a crime to have recourse to it to preserve a peaceful population from the hands of bandits who recoil from no cruelty to gratify their criminal instincts. In the East the lex talionis is habitually applied; and when one comes to know the perfidy and cruelty of the Persians, one is less astonished at the horrible vengeance with which various chiefs and sovereigns have ensanguined the pages of their history; one even ends, in presence of the abominable crimes one witnesses, by habituating one's-self to the idea of the atrociously refined punishments to which justice is sometimes obliged to have recourse, not only to avenge society, but to endeavour to curb the sanguinary passions of the villains that abound in Persia." Admitting the force of these palliative arguments, it is fair to insist that such terrible severities should be accompanied by the most rigid justice, which is seldom the case. A crime is committed, the offender escapes and cannot be caught; but as the vengeful arm of Persian law must have its victim, somebody else suffers in his place. Thus, at Shiraz, when M. Flandin was in that neighbourhood, a party of loutis had committed several crimes. They took refuge in the mosque of Shah-Tcherak, one of the most ancient in Persia, which serves as a sort of asylum for needy seids or descendants of the Prophet, who go there to live upon alms and upon its revenues. There the brigands defended themselves, and killed two of the soldiers sent to arrest them. The prince governing at Shiraz, unwilling to lose his men, and to make the mosque a scene of bloodshed, ordered that the loutis con should be allowed to escape. They asked no better, and were soon out of the town. But the authorities, vindictive as feeble, were not to be thus appeased; they must revenge on somebody the crimes of the men they suffered to fly. So the ketkhodah (mayor) of one quarter of the town, who had the reputation, well or ill deserved, of favouring bad characters, was laid hold of and decapitated. The kalantar (tax-gatherer), cerning whom similar rumours were afloat, was also arrested, but obtained his release, probably by emptying his purse for what is there that cannot be obtained for money in Persia, the most venal even amongst Oriental lands? There a long purse is the traveller's prime requisite. But the longest would soon be emptied if he yielded to all demands, and sometimes a heavy horsewhip may be advantageously substituted; for in Persia it is often better to be readyhanded than open-handed. A determined mien, good arms, and promptness in using them, are indispensable to the foreigner. This Messrs. Flandin and Coste were not long in discovering when they parted from the ambassador and his suite, who were bound for France by way of Bagdad, and commenced independent rambling. The parting took place at Ispahan, still a great city, in spite of its decay, its many ruined buildings, its scanty population. Ispahan is half the world, says the boasting Persian proverb, still popular; and certainly it is one of the world's largest cities, its circumference being twenty-four English miles. But this includes a great deal of rural suburb, many palaces and gardens, and even villages that cluster around, and now form part of the city. Its vast extent, its numerous stately domes and elegant minarets, strike the traveller with admiration, but on entering he finds its streets solitary, and its inhabitants few. M. Flandin gives a long and interesting account of Persia's former capital, before quitting it upon an excursion to the west. The party consisted of himself and M. Coste, a French valet-de-chambre, a Genoese cook-a real poisoner, but who atoned in some degree for his culinary deficiencies by his skill as an inter preter-two sais or grooms, and three muleteers. The caravan was preceded by two of the Shali's goulems or couriers, armed cap-d-pie, bearing the travellers' firmans, and charged to make them everywhere respected, and to find them quarters. Thus escorted, the two artists started on their first independent expedition. But a Persian start is a long business. In that country, the first day's jour-. ney extends no farther than to the gate of the town. There they camp and sleep, and sometimes proceed the next morning; but this is by no means always the case, and frequently they remain in the same place for several days. They do not invariably trouble themselves to pass through the city gate, but pitch their tent in some square or open place. Having done so-and no matter how long they remain there they are considered to be on the road. The origin of this strange custom may probably be traced to the time, generally consumed on the first day of a journey in properly apportioning and fixing the baggage upon the mules-always a long and troublesome business with dilatory muleteers, and in the narrow streets of Oriental cities. The privilege customarily enjoyed in Persia, by all persons travelling under government auspices, of free quarters, and rations for themselves, their servants, and their cattle, was not taken advantage of by M. Flandin and his friend, who used their firman merely to make themselves respected by the untrustworthy and perfidious race they roamed amongst. They paid for everything, to the great disgust of their couriers, who wished, as usual, to make the oppressive and arbitrary right a pretext for plunder, extortion, and ill treatment of the peasantry. Their justice and forbearance earned them no increased respect from their attendants, or even, at first, from the people they so considerately spared for rank, in Persia, is generally estimated by the insolence and extortion practised. But after a while, and in most cases, the villagers understood the state of the case, and showed much deference and gratitude to the travellers who thus gave money for that which, according to Persian ideas, they had a perfect own right, as they certainly had the power, to exact gratis. They had abundant botherments upon the road without increasing them by continual contests for food and forage. Their first dispute was with their muleteer, whom they had been so weak as to pay in advance, he having refused to start if not paid beforehand-for the curious and thoroughly Persian reason that, as they were the Shah's guests, they might probably, when once upon the line of march, discharge their debt with a good cudgelling, a circulating medium very current between the grandees of that happy land and their inferiors. But it appears that in Persia, when two persons enter into an agreement, there is always one dupe where there are not two. So, the muleteer, having taken his precautions, and pocketed his money, his employers were doomed to victimisation in some form or other. They had not long to wait. They knavish tchervadar had brought his very worst mules; some of them died, and he replaced them by asses which had difficulty in keeping up with the caravan, and continually brought it to a halt. On reaching the little town of Cougha, M. Flandin insisted on his purchasing a horse, in lieu of one left upon the road. The muleteer protested he had left all his money at Ispahan, and, although paid in full, wished his employers to give him more. rather too much for the travellers' patience and mansuetude. They had the knave tied to a tree, and the two guards searched him, but he had hidden his purse so well that they could not find it. Thereupon the whip was applied, and after a certain number of lashes, the rogue, finding the Franks beginning to act like Persians, produced his money, bought a horse, and was the best fellow in the world. With Persians there is nothing like the thong. Incidents of this kind were of almost daily occurrence during M. Flandin's journey, until he at last seems to have got thoroughly roused, and to have whip or sabre constantly in hand. He had several very narrow escapes, and received some slight wounds during his adventurous journey. The mayors of the villages were often trouble This was |