OF SIAM. 255 



These are sufficiently decisive of the fact, that the Court is equally 

 devoid of real splendor, as its inmates are of taste, feeling and honor ; and 

 that a paltry affectation of rating their knowledge, institutions, and 

 strength as a nation, at a level beyond that to which other people of other 

 regions have attained, and a morbid, fantastical and delusive imagination, 

 have insensibly nursed and matured in them the belief, that their country 

 and all that appertains to it, are collectively or individually superlative, 

 or as they would express it — ek " the one,'" than which nothing is greater. 



To pull them down from this high vantage ground to which a sickly 

 fancy has raised them would be no easy task. The events of the Burmese 

 war has no doubt shaken the basis of their pampered vanity. Yet nothing 

 has transpired in the measures and ostensible jjolicy of their Court to shew 

 that it has wrought a very salutary change : and if such a palpable, and 

 it might be thought fearful, example has proved no obvious stumbling 

 block to them, but has only contributed to render them greater bigots to 

 former systems, there is no likelihood of their soon emerging from demi- 

 barbarism, or of a field being opened on which either enlightened philan- 

 thropy can labor with any prospect of success — or policy calculate for the 

 issue of the future. 



Still the existing defects which we cannot but deplore, belong more to 

 the Government than to the people ; who are naturally cheerful, imagina- 

 tive and charitable. Their poetry, romances and dramatic works have all 

 a powerful tendency to soothe the mind, and even to take from the bitter- 

 ness of the thraldom they endure. Living in the Utopian land of fancy, 

 and viewing every thing as if it were actually what it ought to be, and not 

 what it really is, truth, and particularly that sort which is apt to destroy the 

 illusive mirage which surrounds them, becomes to them an unwelcome guest, 

 divested in their sight of every attraction which endears her to civilized man. 



It will be well for Siam if schemes of conquest do not lead to her ruin. 

 She was not long since in the high way to military supremacy over the 

 whole Malayan Peninsula, although conscious that she must in her course 



