hundred miles, was in itself a fertile and beautiful oasis, where a numerous army might be refreshed and provisioned, and established as on a vantage-ground.  From thence the Persians, strengthened and officered by the Russians, might roll on towards Cabool, and there prepare for a descent upon India.  This magnificent but terrible idea was not examined in its details—­it was taken for granted as a thing not only possible but probable; and the far-distant region of Hindostan, separated as it was by deserts, mountains, and rivers from the tumult that agitated Central Asia, was stirred by conflicting feelings of terror and exultation.  British India, from the Himalaya to the sea, is dotted here and there with native states, which the inconsistent policy of the Company in Leadenhall Street has preserved in a kind of liberty, as relics and remembrancers of a past régime.  But besides these uncertain protégés, we had to look to the natives in our own provinces, who seemed to expect that something would happen—­they knew not what, any more than their rulers.  ‘Among our Mussulman subjects,’ says Mr Kaye, ’the feeling was somewhat akin to that which had unsettled their minds at the time when the rumoured advent of Zemaun Shah made them look for the speedy restoration of Mohammedan supremacy in Hindostan.  In their eyes, indeed, the movement beyond the Afghan frontier took the shape of a Mohammedan invasion; and it was believed that countless thousands of true believers were about to pour themselves over the plains of the Punjab and Hindostan, and to wrest all the country between the Indus and the sea from the hands of the infidel usurpers.  The Mohammedan journals, at this time, teemed with the utterances of undisguised sedition.  There was a decline in the value of public securities; and it went openly from mouth to mouth, in the streets and the bazaars, that the Company’s Raj was nearly at an end.’

Under these circumstances, it seemed necessary to look to the intervening country, Afghanistan, which in this summary manner was to be made a ‘platform of observation’ for the Perso-Russian army to prepare for its descent upon Hindostan.  The Afghans were tribes of hardy mountaineers, inhabiting a wild and thinly-peopled country.  They consisted of soldiers, husbandmen, and shepherds, all convertible, at a moment’s notice, into thieves and bandits; and through their formidable defiles flowed an uncertain stream of commerce, connecting India with the distant provinces of Persia and Russia.  So little was known of these mountaineers, that in the early part of this century, their prince, Shah Zemaun, was a formidable bugbear to the Indian Council, and nothing was thought of for a time but an invasion of the Afghans.  In one of the sudden revolutions, however, so common in semi-barbarous states, this shah was taken captive, and his eyes punctured with a lancet—­a summary act of deposition in the East, for a blind man cannot reign.  Two of his brothers competed