be said on both sides? The highest wisdom is to gather experience from the past, and apply it to the necessities of the future."

"Agreed," said the rough man: "we must therefore reform." "Agreed," said the smooth man: "reform is useless."

I immediately perceived how the matter stood, and, with that penetration for which all Persians are famous, I discovered the true state of the whole country. I saw that the people were divided into two sects, as much opposed to each other as Jews are to true believers; that plain sense had as little chance in the controversy as a sober man may have in the brawls of two drunkards; and that, before things get straight, each of the drunkards must be sobered by breaking their shins in stumbling over a stone, or their heads by carrying them too high.

CHAPTER VIII.

WE continued to drive onwards: the faster we went, the more the infidels argued. I sat in my corner guessing my way through their words, and already making up in my mind the sort of letter which I should write to the Asylum of the Universe upon the state of this extraordinary country, whilst my silent friend, with his hook-stick and close-buttoned coat, shut his eyes and slumbered; only occasionally giving signs of life. At length we arrived at a house which I supposed might be a caravanserai, after the Franc fashion, open to true believers, for, on looking up I saw painted upon a board an elephant with a castle upon its back. I began to think this might be in compliment to me, seeing that elephants are part of the state of Persian monarchs: but I was mistaken, because, instead of taking any notice of me, the sahib najib, on the contrary, did not show his usual civility; but, putting his head out of the window, he asked one of the bystanders, "Is there any news astir ?"

"Nothing particular," said an unconcerned infidel; "nothing. The papers say, ' A man threw a stone and has broken the king's head!""

"There," said the smooth man to the rough, "there, that comes of your reform !"

"I deny that," said the other: "on the contrary, it comes of your no-reform."

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Why, surely," answered the sahib najib, “if you had not taught the people not to respect their king, to despise his nobles, and to laugh at the laws, such an atrocity never would have happened."

"No, indeed, it never would," retorted the other, "if you had made such changes that the people would love their king, respect his nobles, and be satisfied with the laws."

Then you think stoning your king a right thing to do?" said one.

"Then you allow making him odious," answered the other, "is what ought to be done ?"

"Will a stone get up and throw itself?"

"Will a man complain unless he be aggrieved ?"

"Hallo! my friend," said the sahib najib to the bystander, "what is said about this atrocious act, eh ?"

Why, some say, 'Poor king!' others say, Poor stone!"" answered the bystander in the coolest manner possible.

At this I began truly to have an insight into things, and could not help exclaiming in the bottom of my gullet, "Allah Allah, il Allah! There is but one Allah!"

"You understood what that man said ?" said Jan Pul to me, with a sigh, and in a low voice.

"Belli, yes," said I, "wonderful! The men of this country are lions without saints. Allah! Allah! to throw a stone at

the king, and no executioner by, to cut the wretch's head off." "No, no," said he, "that must be proved; first, whether it was a stone; second, whether it was a man who threw it; and, third, whether it hit the king's head, or some other head."

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Aman, aman! Mercy, mercy !" I exclaimed; "let me return to Persia. If so little is said about breaking the king's head, where shall I turn for justice if some one cuts off my ears? Well may the people want reform !"

"I will just prove to you, sir," said the soft infidel, "that this case just proves that we want no reform."

"How!" said I, "break your king's head, and nobody to mend it !"

"That is not the case," said he. "If a people have so much security from the laws, that not even the poorest wretch, even for a crime of such magnitude, can be condemned without proof against him and a full trial, surely they cannot complain: they are all equal in the eye of the law, and more they cannot want." He said this in great exultation, having obtained, as he conceived, a complete triumph over his adversary, and eyed him with appropriate scorn.

The rough man looked as if his head went round and round, and as if he were come to a full stop; but, pulling up the two ends of his shirt,-I suppose to show that he had one,-he said, "If the people have one good law, is that a reason why they should not have more? The great man may get his head broke, -he is rich and mighty, a little salve cures him, and he is as rich and happy as ever; but the poor man who has broken it, save the satisfaction of making a good throw, he remains as poor and miserable as ever."

"Then, sir," said the sahib najib, "you would have what can never be, you would have perfect equality amongst mankind ?"

"Yes, truly," exclaimed the other; "because, if all were equal, there would be no heads broken, and no stones thrown."

This, too, I understood, and said, "What words are these? All men cannot be kings, nor can they all be viziers, nor all khans. I, who know nothing of your extraordinary customs, I can understand that. Were I to think of being anything but what I am, might not my neighbour think so too; and if I wished to be him, and he me, why, then the world would soon be upside down, and from one end of the universe to the other there would be nothing but clutching of beards, and cries of justice, and no justice!"

"Whatever you may say," said the rough infidel, "we must have more equality in our country than we have at present, or else the world will turn upside down. The rich must be poorer, and the poor richer."

During this conversation we were in rapid motion, driving through streets lighted up as magnificently as if the Shah himself had ordered a feast of fire-works, and ornamented by shops exhibiting such riches, that not all the wealth brought from Hind by Nadir Shah, or amassed by the Sofi, could compare

to it.

"Strange," thought I to myself, "that this people are not satisfied with their lot!" Passing by a splendid' shop, resplendent with cutlery, part of my instructions came into my head, and I said to the rough man, "In the name of the Prophet, do you still make penknives and broad-cloth ?"

At this question my companion stared, and said, "Penknives and broad-cloth, did you say? Why, we have more penknives and broad-cloth than we know what to do with. We have made so much and so many, that the whole world has more of them than it wants; and the poor creatures, the manufacturers, are starving for want of work. Surely this wants reform."

This was delightful news for me, and I longed to send an immediate courier to the Shah to inform him of the important fact.

"Whose fault is it ?" said the soft man, determined not to be beaten on any ground. "If manufacturers will do too much, whose fault is it but their own? Unless you make a reform in common sense, surely no other reform is needful."

By this time the coach had stopped, and I found that we had reached our last menzil. The rough man got out first; but just as he was stepping down, in order to ensure the last word, he exclaimed, "We want reform not only in that, but in everything else, more particularly in rotten boroughs."

At these two last words, the soft man became evidently angered, his liver turning into blood, whilst his face became red. "Rotten boroughs, indeed! the country is lost for ever if one borough is disfranchised."

These words were totally new to my ears, and what they meant I knew not; but I became quite certain that the rough man had hit the smooth man in a sore place. But I was in the

seventh heaven at the end of their controversy. I had never heard such warmth of argument, not since that famous dispute at the Medressah, in Ispahan, between two famous Mollahs, the one a suni, the other a shiah, whether the children of the true faith, in washing according to the prescribed law, were to let the water run from the hand to the elbow, or whether from the elbow to the hand. They argued for three whole moons, and neither were convinced; and so they remain to this day, each in his own persuasion.

"How will it be possible," thought I, "to unravel this intricate question? It is plain these English are a nation of madmen. Oh! could they but take one look at my country, where the will of one man is all in all,-where no man's head is safe on his shoulders for one moment,-where, if he heaps up riches in the course of many years, they may be taken from him in an hour,-where he does not even think for himself, much less speak,-where man is as withering grass of the field, and life as the wind blowing over it; could they but know this, short would be their controversies. They would praise Allah with gratitude for their condition, be content with their fate, and drive all wish of change from their thoughts, as threatening the overthrow of their happiness.

SHAKSPEARE PAPERS.-No. III.

ROMEO.

"Of this unlucky sort our Romeus is one,

For all his hap turns to mishap, and all his mirth to mone."

The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet.

"NEVER," says Prince Escalus, in the concluding distich of Romeo and Juliet,

was there story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo."

It is a story which, in the inartificial shape of a black-letter ballad, powerfully affected the imagination, and awakened the sensibilities, of our ancestors, and in the hands of Shakspeare has become the love-story of the whole world. Who cares for the loves of Petrarch and Laura, or of Eloisa and Abelard, compared with those of Romeo and Juliet? The gallantries of Petrarch are conveyed in models of polished and ornate verse; but, in spite of their elegance, we feel that they are frosty as the Alps beneath which they were written. They are only the exercises of genius, not the ebulli

tions of feeling; and we can easily credit the story that Petrarch refused a dispensation to marry Laura, lest marriage might spoil his poetry. The muse, and not the lady, was his mistress. In the case of Abelard there are many associations which are not agreeable; and, after all, we can hardly help looking upon him as a fitter hero for Bayle's Dictionary than a romance. In Romeo and Juliet we have the poetry of Petrarch without its iciness, and the passion of Eloisa free from its coarse exhibition. We have, too, philosophy far more profound than ever was scattered over the syllogistic pages of Abelard, full of knowledge and acuteness as they undoubtedly are.

But I am not about to consider Romeo merely as a lover, or to use him as an illustration of Lysander's often-quoted line,

"The course of true love never did run smooth."

In that course the current has been as rough to others as to Romeo ; who, in spite of all his misfortunes, has wooed and won the lady of his affections. That Lysander's line is often true, cannot be questioned; though it is no more than the exaggeration of an annoyed suitor to say that love has never run smoothly. The reason why it should be so generally true, is given in "Peveril of the Peak" by Sir Walter Scott; a man who closely approached to the genius of Shakspeare in depicting character, and who, above all writers of imagination, most nearly resembled him in the possession of keen, shrewd, every-day common-sense, rendered more remarkable by the contrast of the romantic, pathetic, and picturesque by which it is in all directions surrounded.

"This celebrated passage

['Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,' &c.]

which we have prefixed to this chapter, [chap. xii. vol. i. Peveril of the Peak,] has, like most observations of the same author, its foundation in real experience. The period at which love is felt most strongly is seldom that at which there is much prospect of its being brought to a happy issue. In fine, there are few men who do not look back in secret to some period of their youth at which a sincere and early affection was repulsed or betrayed, or became abortive under opposing circumstances. It is these little passages of secret history, which leave a tinge of romance in every bosom, scarce permitting us, even in the most busy or the most advanced period of life, to listen with total indifference to a tale of true love." *

These remarks, the justice of which cannot be questioned, scarcely apply to the case of Romeo. In no respect, save that the families were at variance, was the match between him and Juliet such as not to afford a prospect of happy issue; and everything indicated the possibility of making their marriage a ground of reconciliation between their respective houses. Both are tired of the quarrel. Lady Capulet and Lady Montague are introduced in the very first scene of the play, endeavouring to pacify their husbands; and, when the brawl is over, Paris laments to Juliet's father that it is a pity persons of

Was Sir Walter thinking of his own case when he wrote this passage? See his Life by Lockhart, vol. i. p. 242. His family used to call Sir Walter Old Peveril, from some fancied resemblance of the character.