258 Mr St John on the Mongols, 



use of forges into the country— by the Chinese, from the blue 

 wolves and white goats, which they assert to be the ancestors 

 of all the Mongols ; but, as I have already obsei-ved, by Ra- 

 shid-eddin and other credible authorities, from Budantzar, son 

 of Alung-goa. This is not the place to relate the exploits or 

 estimate the character of that celebrated conqueror. I shall 

 merely observe, that after spreading on every side with asto- 

 nishing rapidity, massacring or enslaving surrounding nations, 

 the Mongols beheld their brilliant but brief period of conquest 

 fade away, and were once more confined to their steppes and 

 plateaus, and reduced to live on their herds and a scanty agri- 

 culture. The establishments they made in foreign countries, 

 if we except China and Hindustan, had none of the elements 

 of duration. They could storm and sack fortified places, win 

 pitched battles, build cities in the midst of wildernesses, but 

 they could not, at least in most instances, conceive and exe- 

 cute any plan for keeping the fertile districts they overran in 

 anything like lasting subjection. It remained for their bre- 

 thren the Turks to perfect a system by which a barbarous 

 tribe, such as they were, could establish a permanent sway 

 over a civilised though efi*eminate empire. 



The Mongols, however, were soon driven back from their 

 splendid acquisitions ; or, rather, as soon as fresh accessions 

 to their forces ceased to flow from their original seat, they 

 melted into the populations they had conquered, without in- 

 fluencing in any perceptible degree their form of government, 

 their manners, or their religion. This last, indeed, the Mon- 

 gols in most cases received from the conquered. 



There are two periods in the history of Mongolia since the 

 days of Genghis Khan : the first extends through the thirteenth, 

 fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries ; the seventeenth 

 was an age of transition ; the second period continues to our 

 own day. 



During all this time there may be observed a gradual revo- 

 lution in the manners and character of the Mongols, amply 

 accounted for by the changes in their political condition and 

 religious ideas. In the first place, we behold the imperfect 

 civilisation they had attained to under Genghis Khan, rapidly 

 giving way before the influences of their climate and the con- 



