by impudence I have restored the
dying to health--by impudence, in short, I lead a life of great ease,
and am feared and respected by those who, like you, do not know what
dervishes are.'

Equally unsparing is his exposure of the reputed pillars of the Church,
_mollahs_ and _mushteheds_, as illustrated by his excellent stories of
the Mollah Bashi of Tehran, and of the mollah Nadan. He ridicules the
combined ignorance and pretensions of the native quacks, who have in
nowise improved since his day. He assumes, as he still might safely do,
the venality of the _kadi_ or official interpreter of the law. He places
upon the lips of an old Curd a candid but unflattering estimate of the
Persian character, 'whose great and national vice is lying, and whose
weapons, instead of the sword and spear, are treachery, deceit, and
falsehood'--an estimate which he would find no lack of more recent
evidence to corroborate. And he revels in his tales of Persian
cowardice, whether it be at the mere whisper of a Turcoman foray, or in
conflict with the troops of a European Power, putting into the mouth
of one of his characters the famous saying which it is on record that
a Persian commander of that day actually employed: 'O Allah, Allah, if
there was no dying in the case, how the Persians would fight!' In this
general atmosphere of cheerful rascality and fraud an agreeable climax
is reached when Hajji Baba is all but robbed of his patrimony by his own
mother! It is the predominance in the narrative of these and other
of the less attractive aspects of Persian character that has led some
critics, writing from the charitable but ill-informed distance of an
English arm-chair, to deprecate the apparent insensibility of the author
to the more amiable characteristics of the Iranian people. Similarly,
though doubtless with an additional instigation of ambassadorial
prudence, Sir Harford Jones-Brydges, Morier's own chief, wrote in the
Introduction to his own Report of his Mission to the Persian Court these
words:--

'One may allow oneself to smile at some of the pages of "Hajji Baba";
but it would be just as wise to estimate the national character of the
Persians from the adventures of that fictitious person, as it would be
to estimate the national character of the Spaniards from those of Don
Raphael or his worthy coadjutor, Ambrose de Lamela.... Knowing the
Persians as well as I do, I will boldly say the greater part of their
vic