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at once proceed to deliver it to the taipan 14 Brown belonging to the said country for further transmission by him back to his country, so that the King in question may be still further filled with grateful obligation and reverent submission, and our affectionate tenderness be thus made manifest.

'The rule is that officials of the Celestial Court may not have any truck with outer barbarians. Chukwei therefore did right to give him orders to take back the objects presented to the former viceroy and the Hoppo.'

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N.B.—In all the above papers there are words which do not admit of exact translation. For instance, the word translated barbarian' cannot possibly be accurately rendered: it is rather 'outlandish' or 'strange,' having in it at the same time that suspicion of inferiority which is wrapped up in the vague English word 'natives' as opposed to genuine white men, or in the American expression ' coloured folk.' The use of thou' denotes unmistakable inferiority. Such words as order,'' submissive address,' 'policy,' 'etiquette,' 'commiseration,' civilisation,' devout respect,' imperial commands,' and tender affection' are susceptible of many turns and shades in translation. However, the rendering is word for word and literal throughout, so far as the Chinese language admits of it.

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6

E. H. PARKER.

14 Taipan is a Cantonese word meaning 'partner' or 'head of a commercial house,' but referring solely to Europeans. The Hoppo-a 'pidgin-English' word-is the Comptroller of Customs.

THE BAB AND BABISM 1

IN 1845, in the city of Shiraz, the seat of learning, as the Persians say—of rose-gardens and of nightingales, as I would call it -a young Persian began to preach. He had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and came back full of ideas of his own-mystic and enthusiastic ideas, which evade definition and perplex the downright Anglo-Saxon understanding. However, he made it quite clear that, in his opinion, the people in general, and the priests in particular, had departed widely from the cardinal doctrines of Muhammadanism, and that the priests, in their lives, were far from practising what they did more or less erroneously preach. Now my readers will say that this is very vague; but I will make bold to say that Bab was at first as vague as myself, but his mystic hints and unintelligible suggestions were taken for the significant, if not for the magnificent. Let anyone who has studied Eastern writings on religion deny, if he can, that to get anything definite out of them is as difficult as the proverbial extraction of a needle from a bundle of hay. However, the young man called himself the Gate of Heaven-the 'Bab;' and it is said that he possessed a handsome appearance, engaging manners, and an eloquent tongue-powerful agents at all times for the accomplishment of any ends. A little later, and the Gate of Heaven represented himself as an emanation from the Divinity itself, and then assumed the title of 'Highness,' by which, also, Jesus, the son of Mary, or Miriam, is habitually known amongst Muhammadans. Next he gathered about him eighteen apostles, not that he might have half as many again as had his Highness Jesus, but because a peculiar sanctity, in his opinion, attached to the number nineteen. He, the prophet of God, the latest revelation, was the central point, round which revolved eighteen satellites, and, like the French Revolutionists, he would have renumbered and renamed everything, only with him everything would have had reference to the whole, or to the component parts of the mystic number.

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Among his disciples were several persons of courage, eloquence,

This article was written before the assassination of the late Shah of Persia.ED. Nineteenth Century

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?

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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

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