332 THE NEAR EAST. 



English envoy on the soil of the sacred palace as 

 he retired from the Persian Court to be effaced 

 with a basin of sand ! ^ 



With the swing of the pendulum of time the tables 

 have been rudely turned, the resources of Persia are 

 heavily mortgaged to her former debtor, the antics of 

 her court recall the buffooneries of an English sovereign 

 when surprised, in the midst of frivolity and feasting 

 in company with the ladies of his seraglio, by the 

 thunder of the guns of Holland in the Medway and 

 the Thames, and, far from the " impure footprints " 

 being effaced, an ill-disguised impatience was exhibited 

 for the arrival of the expected envoy, bearing a coveted 

 decoration from England's king. 



It must be admitted that English statesmen and the 

 British public have at times shown a woeful lack of 

 proper appreciation of the part which Persia is 

 destined to play in "Middle Eastern" developments. 

 Periods of feverish concern in the affairs of the 

 dominions of the "King of kings" have alternated 

 with epochs of equally distracting apathy, so much so 

 that one of the ablest of English writers on Eastern 

 matters has been led into raising his voice in a scathing 

 jeremiad against public callousness. " If, then," wrote 

 Sir Henry Pawlinson in the 'Sixties, " there was danger 

 to British India from the attitude and possible designs 

 of Russia twenty-eight years ago, that danger must be 



^ The envoy was Jenkinson, one of the company of merchant adven- 

 turers which had been formed in the reign of Edward VI. to discover 

 "regions, kingdoms, islands, and places unknown and unvisited by the 

 highway of the sea." Their first venture took them to that strange 

 sea girding the north-eastern countries of Europe, spoken of by Tacitus 

 as "a sluggish mere and motionless — which forms the girdle of the world, 

 where you hear the sound of sun-rising ! " and cast them eventually on 

 the coast of Russia. The result was the opening up of commercial inter- 

 course between England and Russia and the little-known lands beyond. 

 The Shah was Shah Tahmasp, and the year 1562. 



