It is said that a well-appointed host * of 23,000 men, besides swarms of irregular cavalry, and an efficient battering-train, have already commenced operations. The ostensible motive for the siege is similar to that put for ward by Russia for interfering in the internal administration of Turkey. A considerable number of the inhabitants of Herat, being descendants from a colony established by Nadir Shah, profess the Sheeah, or Persian form of Mahommedanism, and have consequently been subjected to some persecution by the prevailing Soonnites. The Shah, therefore, comes forward as the protector of his coreligionists, and demands the possession of Herat as a "a material guarantee" for their toleration and freedom from insult throughout Afghanistan. On the same grounds a French or Austrian army might lay claim to Dublin or Cork, for the purpose of defending the Roman Catholics of Ireland from Protestant tyranny. But there remains for England the same necessity as of aforetime, for the preservation of Herat. "It may be of the very highest importance," wrote Mr. McNeil, on the former occasion, "to preserve the independence of Herat, or at least to prevent its being incorporated with Persia; and, if the Shah should succeed in taking Herat, we shall have reason to regret not having interfered to prevent it."

The same necessity existing, the same means are being adopted for rescuing this advanced post of our Indian empire from the grasp of Russianized Persia. Probably as we write these lines, 5,000 British troops are encamped on Karrak and the ndjacent islands, while a steam flotilla commands the waters of the Persian Gulf. Karrak-the Icarus of Arrian -contains a superficial area of rather more than twelve square miles. Its surface is described as being exceed

ingly rugged, but on the east side it is not incapable of cultivation. Of more importance is it that it affords safe and spacious anchorage, and that it contains an abundant supply of both spring and well water. At the present moment there are not above 300 inhabitants, chiefly engaged in fishing; but in the time of the Dutch the population is said to have exceeded 3,000. The permanent occu"pation of this small island would secure the command of the Persian Gulf, and, if it did not acquire the amity, would at least neutralize the hostility of the Persian Government. Should the Euphrates line of communication be ever opened, this post would become one of great importance. The Caspian Sea and the

Persian Gulf would thus become the antipodes of Russian and British diplomacy, and Central Asia would form a neutral ground between the absorbing races. To the rest of Europe it must be a matter of perfect indifference, whether the English.or Persian flag float over the barren rocks of Karrak, except that under the former an additional barrier is raised against Muscovite ascendancy. With much less reason our French allies possessed themselves of Otaheite, and cannot therefore object to a measure which, while it protects British India from foreign insult and internal disturbance, tends to secure the preservation of peace in Asia, and the ultimate tranquillity and welfare of the Persian dominions. The primary expense of the occupation of Karrak is, comparatively, a matter of little consideration; for, to borrow the quaint illustration of Sir Harford Jones" The British territories in India are a park, valuable enough to justify the proprietor in spending a little money to keep its pales in perfeet repair and security.""

FIRST, you will wish to know why I was christened sop. There is an obvious answer: I was born Smith. I come of a family that has exhausted ingenuity in providing its innumerable scions with distinctive pre

names; that has worried its patronymic with every possible spellingeven unto Smijth, where the mysterious reduplication of the i, however zoologically orthodox, totally paralyses the power of pronunciation,-of a

family that has resolved at length to regard the prefix as everything, and the surname as nothing. That is one reason why I was christened Æsop.

However, as no living creature naturally stands upon one leg, so no earthly result is dependent for all its support upon one only reason; and the second, therefore, is the Æ dipthong. For several generations this E has been the distinguishing feature of our sept; in so much, that among the many clans of our family, we have come to be known everywhere as the Dipthong Smiths, a consummation very pleasing to my respected grandfather, Eschines. This worthy man, the founder of my individual fortune, was a barrister of considerable powers and practice; he had buckled to the law on the strength of his name for he had great faith in names; perhaps from the circumstance that his father, Eolus Smith, had turned out a speculative and therefore ruined man,- one of the innumerable victims to the South-Sea bubble; and from the further fact that his grandfather, Æneas-a schoolmaster, fallen into imbecility in his drivelling dotage was perpetually babbling of the field of Troy. Eolus had named his son Eschines, by way of a sort of dipthong compliment to John Law, the fascinating bubbler of the time; but he little knew how wise a thing he had done in giving his child a name which acted perpetually as a hint to be eloquent and an incentive to be legal. The consequence came to be, in the course of years, that my grandfather grew to be eminent and rich, and thereby to furnish another good reason for my dipthong nomenclature; seeing that his service of plate displayed-perhaps too conspicuously for modern taste on every cover, waiter and spoon, an immense E dipthong under the hereditary griffon. It thenceforward became an additional piece of family pride to find a corresponding initial for the son and heir.

My father's name-and, as the philosophy of naming induces me to add, therefore nature,-was Æsculapius; a worthy, excellent, and useful member of society, who, among other cares, had some little difficulty in keeping up the charter of our dipthongs; as in my case, his eldest

hope, he was hard put to it,-for there seemed only to remain unused by us in former generations, some such questionable appellatives as Ægeon, Æon, Etna, and Ethiopsnone of them very pleasant titles to be bawled by from cradle to grave. But one day, happening, after a visit to St. Bartholomew's, to pass near Snow Hill, Holborn, he cast his eye at once upon my name-and nature, for Esop sank into my soul.

Who has not wondered at the utter desolation of that dreary pile of building [is it not in Skinner street, nigh unto St. Sepulchre's?] in the best business situation in all London, and yet so manifestly under the dragon eye of Chancery, that nobody would have it as a gift? Who has not noticed in the midst of the dingy edifice, surrounded by broken windows and blackened mud-bespattered bill-bedizened shutters, my illustrious namesake modelled in terracotta, not a little damaged by brickbats, and illustrated by preternatural advertisements, in the midst of his immovable audience of cattle? There sits humped and shrewd, preaching to the strayers from Smithfield; and there my good father, accepting the locality as an omen fair for Smiths, decided upon calling me Æsop. My first-born son, if ever I'm to marry and so have one, in order to give him a turn for tragic poetry, shall be dubbed Æschylus.

sop,

I don't wish to be tedious, if I can in anywise help it; and, as with my birth and parentage, so also with my education, will be as short as possible. Quite naturally, the little Esop was so perpetually befabled, was so filled up with the gaieties of Gay and the gravities of Bunyan,(for I need not, of course, mention Esop's fables, imbibed with mother's milk and pap, and nurse's bread and butter,) that he grew to be somewhat of the pundit everybody seemed to be expecting. Great in riddles, keen in conundrums, unapproachable in anagram and rebus, I also came to catch a higher wisdom in the way of everyday parables. I could look nowhere but I learnt a lesson: " sermons in stones, books in the running brooks," and so forth. Flavel's Spiritual Husbandry, and Gurnall's Christian Armour, with the like, were my Sunday reading; and alto

gether (not to be, as I hinted just above, tedious), I found that my education had left me on the confines of manhood with an allegorical, parabolical, imaginative, discriminative idiosyncrasy.

These be "hard 'ords," and "Idiosyncrasy" is, as a climax should be, the very hardest of them all; but it happens to be just the one I want at present, because hereby to be interpreted. We are each of us a "special mixture;" and the learned editor of "Notes and Queries," on the strength of his lexicon, tells me that is much about the meaning of the "hexasyllabical" aforesaid. This special mixture is, in my case, as you may gather, a discernment of truth in her many masqueradings, and a very love of her, however masqueraded. It is the truth that we love, not the fable; it is the pleasant surprise of finding falsehood's weapon turned against itself which tickles ear and heart; it is the glorious hint of a real unity pervading creation in this apparent chaos of diversities, the discovery of universal relationship in smallest and greatest-the eloquence of unsuspected harmony, the beauty of recondite adaptation;these, and many similar possible sentences of fine writing, if anybody cared to read them, constitute the charm of fable, and keep up the fame of Esop. For Esop (spare these modest blushes!) even in his Smith phase, shall yet come to be famous; and though it may be far from easy to be novel nowadays-(the learned editor as above, tells me this ought to be "in our days," but I dissent)-though originality in the fabulous is well nigh as impossible as in the true, I've come to the good resolution in the premises, “to do my best."

Perhaps, however, it ought first to be made apparent why I wish to do it. What possible call or excuse can there be for the Esopisms of a Smith? Is not the world too full of books, and Paternoster Row of booksellers? Can any one read more per diem than the acre and a-half of print supplied daily by special correspondents, from North, East, West and South, the four winds ever blowing NEWS to us? I don't know; I don't care; let my respected publisher see to all that; he is a keen man (this is the idiosyncrasy of a publisher), and

thinks there's room for me, ad·ling some flattering matter which I need not further allude to. For all else, I have flocks of thoughts upon Ly mind, which keep me awake until I've pinioned them in manuscript; and what's the use of manuscript unless it be in print?

The wisdom and the pith of most books can be written on a thumbnail, with or without a fair economising of the space, and a delicate crow-quill. But my respected namsake and spiritual progenitor, Esp, the Phrygian valet aforesaid if Athenian Xanthus, is all pith ani wisdom. How then can I hope to fill these pages with the like? It is not possible; yet I am comfortal by the reflection that the genuine Esop in this type would make but a scanty booklet; so, if a modern must dilute to quantity, it is only fair to put him into an alembic to distil for quality. Quantulâ sapientiâ is a just suspiration as to other matters beside government, e. g. books; for, as no governing could go on with its bare modicum of wisdom-shredded away from oratory, ceremony, mystery and pretension-so no book can be useful to anybody-publisher, reader writer, as a mere undigestible lump of solid sense; or still worse, as ethereal essence of intellect. Nobody can make a meal off wedding cake or Chutnee sauce.

Therefore it is that I must be dis cursive; if now and then you find Esop dull, take it as intended--a foil for brighter things; if oftentimes foolish, ditto, take him for the hunchbacked dwarf to herald in fair wisdom. Only never judge your honest friend to mean any definite personalities; he makes caps, but does not fit them on heads. How can he possibly help an adaptation, demonstrably quite as likely to be the fault of the head as of the cap?

I have said hunchbacked; a fact which others seem to think of more than I do. But the word has escaped my lips, and the rest of my body shall confess its truth. I was born a fair and proper child; but hardly had my sponsors dubbed me before a careless nurse (under some doom to carry out the whole idea with a vengeance), suffered me to crow myself out of her arms, and put my spine awry.

sop,

So soon do we adapt ourselves to a fact, and consent to it if corroborative of a fancy, that really nobody seemed much to heed the accident; there was a propriety in the hunchbacked little sop; and my mother talked so much about the merciful providence of my being spared, that she came to persuade herself that the deformity was a mercy too; more particularly as grandfather Æschines immediately announced to my father his resolution to make the little cripple independent. So all seemed well that fared so well; beyond the pain, poor baby knew nothing about his lifelong misfortune. The nurse cried at her ignominious dismissal ; but everybody else was comforted, and all but acquiescent.

At school they called me Trochee Smith; for I was a bit of a favourite, and the other fellows hated Æsop in his Phædrus phase too entirely to call me by such a name; so, as my spinal bump had necessitated that my left leg should be shorter than the other, their nonsense-verse experience saw me as a Trochee. This, and Dipthong, which all my family affect, have been my nicknames through life.

Satire makes many enemies, and how should I escape? But if such foes do a man no worse turn than mine have done to me, their enmity is venial indeed. For I have only heard from such, certain hard truths about myself, which, under their enlightenment, I will honestly confess to. I am ill-tempered, they say; and proud, with small occasion for the sentiment; and, while pretending to a false philanthropy, far more evidently a true misogynist.

All

this, I, for my part, lay upon my hump. It makes a man cross to see the straighter simpleton win way with pretty girls, who must be silly enough themselves to scoff at hunchbacked wisdom; and I don't see why I should not feel pride at a mental superiority, so weightily outbalancing mere bony beauty. So let them sneer, and let me escape to rides and reveries; for all these things force me into the saddle, where, among the hunt a daring rider, I can distance everything, and win the brush when I choose; or, if (far oftener) I choose to be let alone, I can think and talk, and laugh and sing, and gallop

home when I list to write my reveries. But O, the number that escape me! The many tidy thoughts and pretty turns of speech that come and go in a canter ! Now and then I've tried to scribble them in the very saddle, but it won't do; the thoughts live in the pace, and die when we stop for them. So, then, whatever you happen to get in these pages, have the justice and the charity to believe (what is a universal truth indeed) that there is more in every man than he has yet achieved; and that the best that any author ever gave to men, is not half as good as what he knows he could give. Only there are hitches in daily life; perpetual hindrances and worries, and material obstructions to the peace-needing crystallizations of mind. Lucky Bunyan, with a clear conscience in a quiet prison! Just the man and just the means to make a Pilgrim's Progress.

Before I cease this scant preliminary say, I ought to introduce you to my stud; pretty Brenda, a grey mare with a spirit; Minna, a bay ditto, with black legs and a long square tail, a good bit of stuff enough, but something of a slug; these are my usefuls; and I ought to name beside, poor old Wonder, my steady, sturdy shooting pony, now pensioned out as an Emerita, together with her splendid stallion colt, light dun, with black legs and mane and tail, whom I have named Arabesque, from his Arab sire. These may be esteemed my ornamentals; at all events, a Suffolk-street artist begged their portraits lately, as a model mare and

foal.

Without more ado then, take the benefit of these my reveries; or, metaphysically, ride with me, reader, whenever you may please; if and when you will, you can drop behind or go ahead; for I'm used to my own company, and generally like it quite as well as other people's. Of course I could weary you out and make you tail off, if I chose; and very possibly I shall. My plan will be to ride, or to tell you that I have been riding, when I like and where I like; and stop or have stopped, for a reverie-if anyhow it pleases me. You may be within earshot if you will, for I always think aloud; and my intention (I forewarn you) is to al

Our beautiful valley has a little silver trout stream running down the middle of it, whereof plenty more anon for the Ripple-burn (so we call our rivulet) has before this taught me a thought or two. And now it may truly be said to be accessory to such a thought, for it is the living cause of the pond whereto I'm coming. However, this pond, ambitious of an independent existence, having got itself well filled by our stream, has ungratefully suffered it to slip aside by some trench or other, and remains stagnant. As my little mare trotted lately down the deep lane, and brought me near the ruinous mill-head, I thought I had never seen that large pond look more unwholesome and unseemly it was covered with slime and duckweed: a very filthy-looking miasmatic piece of green stagnation.

I suppose (thought I to myself) this great acreage of corruption typifies our poor old world.

Hardly had I said it-for I generally think aloud-than I saw some cottage children very busily engaged in a dirty creek, where the old punt rotted; they were up to their middles in the green slush, and diligently skimming the duckweed into the punt with laurel leaves.

Why, my poor little industrious idlers, thought I, isn't that very much like the efforts made by our philanthropists? Don't they go about all in the mud, skimming the surface with silver teaspoons, and to pretty nearly as little effect as you, my children? Now if, instead of letting that life-giving streamlet waste its precious energies in a bye-way channel, it were coaxed to run right through the pond, what a stir there would be among the duckweed-what a wholesale skimming would perpetually be performing-what a doing better on the large scale, much about what our laurel leaves and teaspoons are failing to do in the small!

And yet, what more or better can those poor children do? Are they not benefiting their own spirits at all events by charity and industry, and by this diligence in using the laurel leaves of character, and the teaspoons of wealth for achieving all they can of moral cleanliness around them? How can they, poor weaklings, get the stream through the pond, to be a pulse of life within it, an electric current of vitality through it? The stream is the Church, flowing from a pure spring, high up among the hill tops-as the pond is the world, a festering mass of "life in excrements." Not the Church of Gregory, nor the Church of Luther, nor the Church of Wesley, nor the Church of Irving, nor the Church of Joe Smith (my perpetual name has bred a new he resy, as well as contributed to the wealth of nations,) nor any local nor special church at all, but the Church of Christ-that innumerable band of blessed good doers on good principles which is united spiritually as one, but is subdivided materially into individual millions of driblets. Every effort to make many men agree as to outward unity must fail, till the spi ritual conquers the material: but, amidst infinite diversity, there is still a true oneness in the real Church: and there is a Catholicity everywhere felt, although invisible. Did you ever know two candid Christians who disagreed in the main? or two quiet unprejudiced reasoners who did not come closer, as they found points of controversy melt up under explana tions? So then, there is a pure stream, as there is an impure pond; and they want a wedding to make the one useful, and the other wholesome, Meanwhile, skim away, children.