120 TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



you to speak to him of Tiridates or the Romans, and 

 with their thoughts of Persia no ideas of tyranny are 

 mixed : no stirring of the ancient spirit that kept 

 them faithful in an ocean of foes, and rendered their 

 land a continued battle-field. They give no signs of 

 intelligence if you challenge them on the subject of 

 Eutychus, by whose arch heresy they suffered sever- 

 ance from Catholicity, and in whose dogmas they 

 live. They are a quiet, matter-of-fact, business-like 

 people the bankers and capitalists of the kingdom. 

 Their mode of existence under the shadow of the 

 sultan's mercy, but without national representation 

 or protection, has subdued them to a condition of 

 patient endurance, and killed the energy of their 

 nature. They are quiet, fat, and lethargic, reserving 

 their anxieties for money-getting. 



There might be to fiery spirits something humili- 

 ating in the dress to which they are so anxious to 

 acquire the right the huge and ugly cap which 

 bespeaks them to be under some particular foreign 

 protection, as the case may be, which is their only 

 safeguard against all sorts of oppression. But where 

 nationality is a mere idea without embodiment, it 

 soon becomes as a dream. The Armenian is content 

 to be endured and protected. Meanwhile he is not 

 without a sort of national ambition; but it is of a 

 new kind for him. They believe themselves to be 

 the most ancient of people, retaining the original 

 language that was spoken before the dispersion of 



