THE study of Oriental History has been too generally neglected. The western nations, proud of their own advances in all the arts of civilization, look with barbarian indifference on the affairs of people whom they undervalue as barbarians. The remoteness of the scene, the dissimilarity of manners, and above all, the great impediment of language, have discouraged the mass of readers, even while they excited a strong curiosity. But those who have had the patience to surmount such obstacles, have found in the subject a novelty, a variety and an interest that richly reward them. In western history we usually lose the individual in the crowd. In oriental history, on the contrary, we contemplate, not the city or the nation, but the man. We consider, not the slow growth of a community, but the personal memoirs of a hero, upon whose character and fortune hangs the prosperity of the state. History is thus converted into a series of biographical sketches, gorgeous with the coloring of that imagination which produced the splendors of the Arabian Nights. And dull indeed is he who cannot be interested by these eventful stories; full of changes as sudden and amazing as any thing mentioned in fairy tale; full of allusions that take us back to the days when Abraham entertained the angels in his tent, and the servant of Isaac met Rebecca at the fountain; abounding in tales of wild adventure, crushing disaster, splendid triumph and bloody revenge; in numerous and illustrious examples of heroic virtue, mingled with instances of depravity which transcend our worst conceptions of the devil! Cold indeed is he who is unaffected by the vicissitudes of the hero. One day taking refuge from ruin in a deserted hut, and drawing lessons of hope and perseverance from an insect; on another, spreading terror from Pekin to Moscow,

at the head of a million of horsemen. Few can read unmoved, how the tyrant sat in gloomy silence while the streets of the Great City ran with the blood of its citizens, or contemplate without a shudder the remorseless eunuch, counting the pile of eyes with his dagger; his vizier waiting in agony for the order which shall add his own to the heap. With the desire, although scarcely the hope, of reproducing in others the interest which such studies have awakened in ourselves, we will Occupy a few pages with sketch of the life of one of the most remarkable Asiatics of the last age; the restorer of Persia, the conqueror of India, the celebrated Sultan, ABOU SEIF NADIR. SHAH.

In the year 641, eleven years after the death of Mahommed, the ancient empire of Persia sank under the assault of that formidable race whose mingled ambition and fanaticism spread their empire from the summits of the Pyrenees to the sea of Japan. Its independence was recovered by the courage and conduct of the son of a pewterer; but at his death it was again enslaved, and divided for six centuries among a number of Tartar families, the story of whose vicissitudes has an interest which is excelled by no fiction whatever. Reünited under the sway of a Mahommedan devotee, and his descendants, the celebrated dynasty of SOPHI, its magnificent court became once more the pride, the wonder and the terror of the East.

It was during the reign of the ninth monarch of this famous house, that the Affghan tribes of Candahar, under Mahmûd and Ashraff, made that terrible invasion, which is still recalled with horror at the distance of one hundred and twenty years. These warlike savages, the ancestors of those who lately destroyed a powerful English army, had been among the most insignificant of the slaves of the Great King. By their Persian masters they were regarded with bitter contempt and dislike, partly because they were coarse and even savage in their manners, but chiefly because they were non-conformists in religion. The Mahommedan, like the Christian world, is divided between two great sects. The most numerous of the two are called Soonee, or Traditionaries.' They bear to the rest the same relation which the Catholics bear to the other sects of Christendom, 'holding fast the traditions of the fathers' of the Mahommedan Church, the companions and successors of the prophet. Of this faith the Affghans were the humblest yet the staunchest adherents. The other sect are a sort of Mahommedan Protestants. They glory in the name of Sheah, or 'Schismatics.' They reject with contempt the traditions of the Soonees, and take for their rule of faith the Koran alone. They are found chiefly in Persia, where their situation at the time we speak of resembled in many respects that of the English Protestants at the same period. Their religion was the religion of the nation. Their king, like the King of England, was the defender of that faith which had raised his family to power. Their doctrines, like those of the English Church, were interwoven with the very constitution of the state. To make the resemblance still more striking, they had with Turkey and India precisely such religious and political animosities as the English had with France and Spain. Thus they looked upon the Affghans as the zealous whigs of the times of George the First looked upon the

Irish Catholics. They despised them as barbarians, and hated them as non-conformist rebels, who were always ready to assist the foreign enemy in their worst designs against the national government and religion. But at the same time a long peace and a succession of unwarlike sovereigns had tamed their spirit and relaxed their discipline. Accordingly, when the revolted Affghans entered Persia, they met with such resistance only as inspired them to inflict upon their old oppressors every atrocity which native barbarity, exasperated by fanatical hatred, and long cherished vengeance, could suggest. The royal city of Ispahan was blockaded. The miserable inhabitants were reduced to the last extremities of want. A small coarse loaf was sold for thirty-six dollars, and the carcass of a mule for one thousand. The camels, the horses, the flesh of cats and dogs, unclean as they are considered; the leaves and bark of trees; all that was most loathsome, all that was most noxious, were eagerly sought for and greedily devoured. When these were exhausted, they began to eat human flesh. Crowds of lean and famished wretches were seen cutting pieces from the dead carcasses that covered the streets and gardens. Men slew their neighbors, and mothers their children for a meal. At last, when human nature could hold out no longer, the city was surrendered. The aged monarch, the last of an ancient and sacred race, the head of religion as well as of the state, took the crown from his head, and prostrated himself before barbarians detested equally as foreigners, enemies and heretics.

But the Affghan prince, though triumphant, was anything but secure. Tâmâsp, the son of the captive monarch, had escaped from the horrors of the blockade, and was stirring up the tribes of the North. Mahmûd himself was at an immense distance from home. His army, at no time more than twenty thousand strong, had been speedily reduced one quarter by sending detachments to subdue the provinces: and these detachments had been met by universal insurrection, and driven back with great and unexpected slaughter. This first check threw him into the deepest despondency. His fears were visible on his gloomy countenance, and infected his troops, who began to desert. From home he found that he had nothing to expect. An officer whom he had sent to Candahar with more than a million of dollars to raise reinforcements, was attacked on the road and robbed to the last penny. Moreover, a few acts of kindness to the unfortunate Persians, probably extorted from him by the necessities of his position, had been perverted by the suspicious bigotry of the tribes into tokens of his design to abandon the Affghan customs and the Soonee religion. While thus a prey to the keenest anxiety, he was terrified by the desertion of his cousin Ashraff, whose father he had murdered, whose abilities he dreaded, and whom he would have destroyed also, but that he feared the opposition of the tribe. This had the worst effect on his savage and gloomy temper. Distracted by consternation, by suspicion, by fury, and perhaps half mad, he determined to relieve his apprehensions of a revolt by a general massacre of the inhabitants of Ispahan; and he accomplished his design with a treachery and a savage cruelty that finds few parallels even in the bloody annals of Asia.

He began with the nobility. About three hundred of them, the poor remains of the most splendid court of Asia, had been left in the city after its surrender. They were invited to a feast and cut off to a man. There were also in the city three thousand of the body-guards, men selected from all Persia for their vigor and comeliness. He had taken three men into his pay. He had treated them with particular favor. One day they were drawn up in one of the public squares, presented with magnificent dresses, and conducted to a splendid banquet, where they were hardly seated, when they were surrounded and destroyed. But worse remains to be told. Two hundred children, the sons of the murdered nobles, were attending the public schools. He had the infernal cruelty to order even these to execution. The innocents were driven to a field without the city, and butchered like a flock of sheep. By these bloody murders he hoped to excite terror. But the effect did not satisfy him. His days became more gloomy, his nights more restless than before. In every countenance that approached he fancied that he read horror and aversion. He trembled at every noise and started at every shadow. His mind was tortured with remorse, anxiety and approaching madness. At length he gave way to his fears, and ordered the long meditated butchery, February twenty-five, A. D., 1723.

For fifteen days the sword was lifted over the devoted city. The wretched people attempted neither flight nor resistance, and in every street single Affghans were seen leading them by fours and fives at a time to inevitable death. Finally, when the six hundred thousand inhabitants, whom a century of peace had collected in the royal city, were reduced to a remnant so miserable and broken-hearted that even the cowardice of insanity had nothing to apprehend from them, he ordered the slaughter to cease.

Similar butcheries would have desolated the other cities of Irak, but the hand of GoD arrested his career of bloodshed. Soon after the general massacre he died raving mad.

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While the bloody sword of the Affghans was making a desert of the south, the rest of the kingdom was torn by bands of fierce invaders, which, though differing in language, manners and origin, seemed to unite for the extermination of the Persian race. Russians, under the great Peter, possessed themselves of the north; the Turks marched an immense army through the provinces of the west; on the opposite side the Tartars blasted Khorasan with sword and fire. The whole country was distracted by the struggles of innumerable aspirants to the crumbling throne; and to complete the ruin of the empire, a famine broke out, and a pestilence, which together devoured more than the sword. It was precisely when these clouds of ruin were the blackest that the hero arose who was so rapidly to disperse them; whose name was to ring in the ears of his desponding countrymen like the trumpet of jubilee; whose single genius was to supply every deficiency of hope, of courage, of means, of discipline and of concert; who was, out of hosts of cowards and slaves, to form powerful and victorious armies; to make out of bitter enemies the most devoted servants; to erect out of the fragments

of a ruined monarchy a mightier and more splendid empire than that of any of his predecessors; and who, having seated himself on the throne of Chengiz and Timour, and having raised his country to the pinnacle of grandeur, was to close a life full of activity and success by a death full of instruction to all who shall hereafter undertake the government of others without the ability to govern themselves.

NADIR KOOLI, which is, being interpreted, The Servant of GOD the Wonderful,' was born in the month of November, 1688. He belonged to an insignificant clan of the Affshar tribe of Turkomans, of which his father was chief. His family were poor, but respectable, according to Turkoman notions of respectability; that is, they lived on the produce of their flocks and herds, had never been known to engage in trade, and always robbed every body they could lay their hands on. His father dying when Nadir was yet a child, he was left to the care of an uncle, who assumed the command of the clan. From him he received a good Turkoman education. He was taught to ride, to take care of his horse, to handle arms, to endure with patience hunger, thirst, exposure and fatigue. But at the same time he was deprived of his inheritance, and obliged to earn his bread by making caps and jackets of sheep-skin. This was done with the approbation, if not at the express desire, of the clan, who were probably alarmed at the fierce and haughty character which young Nadir began to exhibit. But the ancient fraternity of tailors were soon relieved from one so little calculated to do honor to the craft. Before he had spoiled many sheep-skins he was seized by the Usbeg Tartars in one of their annual forays, and it was several years before he found an opportunity to escape.

When his captivity ended he was twenty-one years of age Four years of slavery had taught him humility and self-control. Friendless, poor, and nearly starved, he wandered about for some time in search of employment, and was glad at last to accept a very humble situation in the household of the governor of Khorasan. From the household he was transferred to the army, where his soldierly quali ties advanced him by degrees to the rank of Mim Bashi, or colonel. His first service in his new situation was against his former masters, the Usbegs. This extraordinary race wander over the immense plains that stretch between the great rivers Sihon and Jihon, the ancient Oxus and Iaxartes. For the Persians they entertain feelings very like those with which the old Scottish borderers used to regard their English neighbors, or those with which the Welsh looked upon the people of the marches, or the Irish on the Lords of the Pale. Not a year passes therefore in which they do not make a foray into Persia. On horses of the best and purest breeds of Asia, whose muscles are trained down to the hardness of iron, they pour into Khorasan just before the time of harvest, at the rate of one hundred miles a day. Breaking into small parties, they spread their force all over the country. The crops are destroyed, the villages are sacked, the houses are burned, the cattle are driven off; men, women and children, stripped almost naked, their arms bound behind them, tied with ropes to the horses of the robbers, are swept into captivity. If