revindicated in more recent diplomatic history by the
services of his nephew, the late Sir Robert Morier, who died in 1893,
while British Ambassador at St. Petersburg.

James Morier was an artist as well as an author. The bulk of the
illustrations in his two journeys were reproduced from his own drawings;
and he left upon his death a number of scrap-books, whose unpublished
contents are, I believe, not unlikely to see the light. In the Preface
to the second edition of Hajji Baba he also spoke of 'numerous notes
which his long residence in Persia would have enabled him to add,' but
which his reluctance to increase the size of the work led him to omit.
These, if they ever existed in a separate form, are no longer in the
possession of his family, and may therefore be presumed to have ceased
to exist. Their place can now only be ineffectually supplied, as in
the present instance, by the observations of later travellers over the
familiar ground, and of inferior gleaners in the same still prolific
field.

Such was the historic _mise-en-scene_ in which James Morier penned his
famous satire. I next turn to the work itself. The idea of criticising,
and still more of satirising, a country or a people under the guise of
a fictitious narrator is familiar in the literature of many lands. More
commonly the device adopted is that of introducing upon the scene the
denizen of some other country or clime. Here, as in the case of the
immortal Gil Blas of Santillane, with whom Hajji Baba has been not
inaptly compared, the infinitely more difficult plan is preferred of
exposing the foibles of a people through the mouth of one of their own
nationality. Hajji Baba is a Persian of the Persians, typical not merely
of the life and surroundings, but of the character and instincts and
manner of thought of his countrymen. And yet it is from his lips that
flows the delightful stream of naive confession and mordant sarcasm
that never seems either ill-natured or artificial, that lashes without
vindictiveness, and excoriates without malice. In strict ratio, however,
to the verisimilitude of the performance, must be esteemed the talents
of the non-Oriental writer, who was responsible for so lifelike a
creation. No man could, have written or could now write such a book
unless he were steeped and saturated, not merely in Oriental experience,
but in Oriental forms of expression and modes of thought. To these
qualifications must be added great powers of in