se of the
Mohammedan tribes who have submitted to the invader. Among these,
however, Schamyl, like his predecessors in the same priestly office,
by no means confides the progress of his sect to spiritual influences
only. The work of conversion, where exhortation fails, is carried on
remorselessly by fire and sword; and the Imam is as terrible to those
of his countrymen whom fear or interest retains in alliance with
Russia, as to the soldiers of the Czar. With a character in which
extreme daring is allied with coolness, cunning, and military genius,
with a good fortune which has hitherto preserved his life in many
circumstances where escape seemed impossible,--it may be seen that the
belief in his supernatural gifts and privileges, once created, must
always tend to increase in intensity and effect among the imaginative
and credulous Mohammedans of the Caucasus; and that this apt
combination of the warrior with the politician and prophet accounts
for his success in combining against the Russians a force of the once
discordant tribes of Daghestan, possessing more of the character
of a national resistance than had been ever known before in the
Caucasus,--and compelling the invaders to purchase every one of their
few, trifling, and dubious advances by the terrible sacrifice of life
already noticed.

In this formidable movement the highlander's natural freedom is fanned
into a blaze by a religious zeal like that which once led the armies
of Islam over one half of Asia and Europe. Although it reached its
highest energy and a more consummate development under Schamyl, it was
begun by his predecessors. Of the Mullah Mohammed, who first preached
the duty of casting off the yoke of the Giaour, and the necessity of
a religious reform and union of rival sects, as a means to that end,
we have already spoken. This founder of the new system, an aged man,
untrained in arms, never himself drew the sword in the cause; but was
active in diffusing its principles and preparing a warlike rising by
exhortations and letters circulated through all Daghestan. Suspected
of these designs, he was seized, in 1826, by the orders of Jermoloff;
and although be escaped,--by the connivance, it is said, of the native
prince employed to capture him,--he afterward lived, in a kind of
concealment, for some years. The post of Imam was thereupon assumed
by a priest who was able to fight for the new doctrine as well as
to preach it. The first armed outbreak too