408 
DESOLATION OF ISPAHAN. 
gay temperament a man of pleasure. He performed pilgrimages on 
foot; he endowed mosques with the splendour of palaces ; his pa¬ 
laces were the seats of legislature; his anderoon, the council of 
arms ; while his gardens, open to the people, resounded with fetes 
and revelling. Such was Ispahan under the sway of Abbas the First. 
Such almost it continued during the reign of Abbas the Second. 
But, whatever were its subsequent splendours, they were all extin¬ 
guished by the merciless arms of its Afghan conquerors; and, hence 
comes the different picture it presents this day, from that which I 
have drawn. Its people are reduced to scarcely one-tenth of the just 
computed numbers; the streets are every where in ruin; the bazars 
silent and abandoned; the caravansaries equally forsaken; its 
thousand villages hardly now counting two hundred ; its palaces 
solitary and forlorn; and the nocturnal laugh and song which used 
to echo from every part of the gardens, now succeeded by the yells 
of jackalls, and the howls of as famishing dogs. How would 
the seer-spirit of our poet of Persia, Thomas Moore, have 
apostrophised the shade of Shah Abbas, the lord of all these 
departed festivities; had he been looking out that moonlight 
night, as I did on the first of my sojourn in that vast and lonely 
palace, on the deep solitude of those former gardens of pleasure ! 
He would have re-peopled those silent glades, with the first of 
the royal name, who made Ispahan the emporium of nations ; 
he would have seen him moving in life and splendour, through 
those gay parterres, and all the city rejoicing in his smiles. He 
would have reversed the vision in his mind, and beheld, and 
painted it as his genius saw, the awful pageantry with which 
this great prince’s last royal descendant, Shah Houssein, (for his son 
was but the shadow of a king,) moved from that palace, in mourn¬ 
ing weeds ; walking through avenues of his perishing subjects, 
