and resolution, probably superior to his own. Among them was the warrior-priest Hussein, who at once saw that a nation which awaited the coming of the Mahdi-the hidden one, the twelfth Imam-would be more likely to believe in the new religion if its prophet were represented as the Mahdi himself. He thus traded on the ignorance of his public, for this pretension was never asserted by Bab. It is impossible, however, as we have reason to know, to keep the Mahdi out of Muhammadan politics, and this confusion of ideas was almost inevitable.

We have to thank Hussein for giving clear expression to two of the chief aims set before the Babees-viz. the abolition of polygamy, and of the doctrine of pollution. It may here be remarked that, of the many unfair criticisms directed against Islam, there is none it deserves so little as that of encouraging polygamy. When the prophet restricted the number of wives to four, he made an immense advance in morality on the state of things existing in his time amongst the Arabs, where practically every woman in a man's household was in some respects in the position of a wife. If he could have gone further, there is little doubt from his teachings that he would have, and, as a matter of fact, his followers are for the most part husbands of one wife, notwithstanding the indulgence allowed by law. It may safely be affirmed that the English are in one sense, and in a manner that is more demoralising and degrading than the authorised polygamy of Islam, at least as polygamous as the Muhammadans themselves. It has been reserved for a canon of the Church of England to stigmatise a great moral reformer as 'an ignorant and immoral Bedouin,' and 'a lecherous Arab,' to whom Mahomet bore, in fact, no greater resemblance than an agricultural scarecrow does to an impaled Bulgarian.

At the town of Kazveen, on the southern side of the Elburz, and not far from the ruins of the castle of the chief of the Assassins, dwelt, at the time of which I write (1845), the beautiful daughter of a Mussulman doctor of the law. Her name was Zareen Taj, or Golden Crown. Her virtues were equal to her beauty; she was eloquent and well-instructed-an ideal heroine. We have to thank her for the enunciation of another of the tenets of the Babees-the abolition of the veil. She showed her beautiful face without any reserve, perhaps the more readily because it was beautiful, embraced the cause of Bab with heart and soul, and, so say the historians, had no share whatever in the murder of her father-in-law--a priest, who naturally was scandalised beyond all measure by her behaviour, and strove, with her other relations, to reclaim her from perdition.

Now these times were pregnant with other great events; and just as the Babees were beginning to feel their strength, the king died, and his Majesty, Nasir-ed-Din ascended the throne of Persia. This was the opportunity for the warrior Hussein, who gathered about

him the converts he had made in Khorassan, and accompanied by Golden Crown, the Hypatia of this new religion, entrenched himself in an inaccessible spot in Mazendaran. Here Hypatia and Hussein preached the Church Militant, whose kingdom should be of this world as well as of the next. Like the Empress Theodora, when the heart of her husband sank within him, and his advisers counselled flight, she was ever present to instil courage into the doubting, and to promise those who fought, and those who lost their lives in battle, a golden crown in heaven. Like Theodora, she would not stop to consider if it became a woman to play the man against men. She urged that those were times when women should abjure seclusion, tear off their veils, not wait for what the men might do, but act themselves. Her eloquence and beauty kindled incredible enthusiasm amongst the Babees in Mazendaran, a Caspian province of the Persian realm, whose thick forests and green foliage form so striking a contrast with the barren rocks and interminable deserts on the other side of the Elburz, beyond the talismanic peak of Demavend. The plan of the campaign was the conquest of Mazendaran, a march to Ré, the ancient Rhages of the Apocalypse, around the venerable tower of which ruined city a great victory was to be gained over the forces of the Shah from the neighbouring capital. The new prime minister sent one of the royal princes with a large army against the Babee chief, who, however, defeated prince and army. The second attack, though successfully repulsed, proved fatal to the brave Hussein, who died, declaring, with glorious mendacity, that he would reappear in forty days and carry his work to its completion. The prime minister continued for four months to besiege the mountain stronghold of the Babees, who, pushed to the last extremities, made flour from the ground bones of the dead, ate the boiled leather of their sword-belts, dug up and devoured buried carrion, and suffered all the horrors of a protracted siege. At last, the few survivors capitulated, their lives being guaranteed them, but all were slain in cold blood next day, including women and children. All refused to recant.

Contrary to the hopes of the king and his minister, this success did not stifle the insurrection. Another of the disciples, the priest Mahomed, successfully defied the royal troops in Zendjan. Mortally wounded in one of the last engagements, he, like Hussein, exhorted his followers to hold out for forty days, at the expiry of which time he would return to lead them on to victory; but soon afterwards they were overcome by the king's general, who opened the tomb of his deceased enemy and found him peacefully lying in his coffin with his sword by his side. They dishonoured his corpse and cast it to the dogs. Three of his chief lieutenants were taken to Teheran and condemned to death by having their veins opened. They died prophesying that their persecutor the prime minister would die the same death, as in fact he did not long after in the peaceful country palace

of Fin by Kashan, where nothing recalls the tragic end of a powerful and erewhile successful minister.

And now the hour of Bab himself was come: summoned to Tabriz by the prince-governor, he was confronted with the doctors of the law, and, according to the side from which one hears the tale, either vanquished them, or was vanquished by them in debate. The prince himself argued a long while with Bab, but finally proved his adversary to be in the wrong by condemning him to death without further ceremony. He probably cared little who won the wordy war. He had conquered the Babees, and might say with Achilles in his grandest speech:

Τοῖος ἐὼν οἷος οὔτις Αχαιῶν χαλκοχιτώνων

Ἐν πολέμῳ· ἀγορῇ δέ τ' αμείνονές εἰσι καὶ ἄλλοι.

lines I would venture thus to translate:

In council what if others mouth the question and reply?

In battle 'midst the brass-clad Greeks, what other strikes as I?

With Bab was his faithful disciple the priest Mahomed, whose loyalty to his master was cruelly tried in his last extremity. His persecutors called in his wife and children to work upon his weakness, if perchance he had any. They tempted him in vain, and, just before sunset, master and disciple were bound with cords, and suspended from the ramparts within a few feet of the ground in the face of a multitude of spectators. A company of soldiers was told off to shoot them as they hung, and, just before the word was given, the priest Mahomed was heard to say to Bab, ‘Master, art thou content with me?' Hardly had he spoken when he received his death wound, but Bab miraculously escaped, and the bullets aimed at him merely cut the cord by which he hung. For a moment all were stupefied, and Bab might have yet escaped had he, in the confusion which ensued, mingled with the crowd, which would have shielded an enfant du miracle to save whom God had manifestly intervened. He took refuge, however, in a guard-house close by, where one of the officers of the firing party cut him down with his sword. That there might be no doubt about his death, his corpse was paraded in the streets, and finally cast to the dogs.

So died the Bab at the age of twenty-seven; but his place was at once taken, if not filled, by Baha, a youth of sixteen years, who, for reasons not very clearly established, was considered by the leaders of the faith to be destined to succeed. Pursued by the emissaries of the prime minister, this youth established himself at Baghdad, where, amongst the crowds of Persian pilgrims to the tombs of the holy Imams at Sandy, Kerbela, and gilded Kazimain, he continued to preach the doctrines of his predecessor and to show the way to the gate of heaven. By some in Persia I was told that, following the example of the veiled prophet of Khorassan, he never shows his face, though

he interviews all comers. I must confess that to my annoyance and disappointment I could learn nothing of himself in Baghdad. Some said the Sultan kept him in prison to please the Shah, but I could discover the existence of no well-known captive, save Suleiman Pasha, who since the Russian war in the city of peace drags out a dishonoured old age. I learnt even less in the Pashalik than in Persia.

All the above events passed in the decade between 1842 and 1852; and one day in the latter year, when the Shah was out riding, three men approached him with a petition, and when his Majesty drew rein, his attendants being a little before and behind him, one of the supplicants seized his bridle and fired upon him, as also did the two others, whose hands were disengaged. The king showed great coolness and courage, the escort galloped up, the men were seized, the Shah was taken home, where his wound proved insignificant. The assassins avowed themselves to be Babees, denied that they had accomplices, and gloried in their act.

When the first alarm had subsided the police set to work to arrest all persons in the capital suspected of being Babees. Among them was Zareen Taj, or Golden Crown, who had left the camp in Mazendaran before its fall. The assassins meanwhile continued to protest that they merely obeyed the orders of their chief away in Turkish Arabia, and declared that the king deserved death for having slain their prophet Bab. No tortures could extract anything else from them.

The king and his minister, perplexed in what way to deal with their captives, offered life and liberty to all who would deny Bab, and began by making the offer to Zareen Taj, who refused unhesitatingly to purchase life by recantation; whereupon she was strangled and burnt in the citadel, and her ashes scattered to the winds. Her dreadful fate, contrary to expectation, had no effect whatever on her fellow-captives, who were distributed among different officials for punishment, to accentuate the public indignation which had been excited by the attempt to murder the king.

Most travellers in Persia have seen by the roadside the little pillars in which robbers have been built up and left to starve, and must have heard fairly credible accounts of crucifixions and other cruel punishments. Nowadays these things do not happen; but there seems no reason to doubt that extraordinary barbarities attended the execution of the Babees in Teheran.

I have been myself told by a nomad chief, who had been an eyewitness, with whom I camped in Fars, that some were shod like horses, some cut to pieces with knives and whips, and some made to carry torches in apertures made for the purpose in their bodies. My informant may have exaggerated, but it is certain that extreme cruelty was the rule. Nothing that is related is beyond belief. To this day robbers are starved to death in cages in China, and parricides

are sliced to death (ling-chih), while the purest and highest morality is the ideal set before the individual Chinaman and the Imperial Government alike.

.

No tortures that ingenuity could devise sufficed to shake the constancy of these martyred men, women, and children, who died repeating the familiar Arabic text: 'Verily we are God's, and to Him we return.' In the provinces, as well as in the capital, all suspects were hunted down. A relative of my friend the nomad chief was particularly active in this service, and conceived the idea of handing over so many captives to tradesmen of different guilds, whose professional instincts might devise some distinctive and characteristic torture.

These terrible reprisals, which probably far exceeded those ordered by the Government, produced, outwardly at any rate, the desired effect. No man dared name Bab or Babee without a curse as deep as that deserved by Omar. The very subject became a dangerous one to speak of, and it still continues to be so. An official at Teheran, who was I knew conversant with the whole subject, denied all knowledge. Officials all declared not one of the sons of burnt fathers remained. Princes, who are plentiful in Persia, considered a reference to the matter in bad taste and would change the subject. Traders, sitting cross-legged amidst their grain and wares, would suggest that if you wanted to buy nothing you had better move on. The result is that even those Europeans who have been long resident in the country really know extremely little about the tenets of the Babees, or their present position, numbers, and prospects. The writings of Bab and Baha are hard to get, and when got still harder to read with understanding.

In the course of this brief narrative I have already said that Bab abjured polygamy, and removed from woman's face the veil. These were no light innovations. The whole weight of tradition and of the law was bound to uphold polygamy to the extent sanctioned by Mahomet, and every father and every husband in the country looked on the veil as one of the safeguards of women's honour. This appears strange only to those who do not know their Eastern sisters, with their burning love and their simple sins.

The cold in clime are cold in blood.

But the Eastern father must keep his daughter from the sight of man till she is safely married, and her husband thinks the same precaution as necessary in the case of his wife. Both are as jealous of the honour of their women as an English gentleman, and perhaps they know best how to maintain it among their own people. They are aghast at customs which prescribe that women's legs shall be carefully covered, while their faces, by which they are recognised and known, may be exposed to the gaze of any passer-by.