Persian habits, methods, points of view, and courses of action, than
any disquisition of which I am aware in the more serious volumes of
statesmen, travellers, and men of affairs. I will proceed to identify
some of these personages and events.

No more faithful portrait is contained in the book than that of
the king, Fath Ali Shah, the second of the Kajar Dynasty, and the
great-grandfather of the reigning Shah. His vanity and ostentation,
his passion for money and for women, his love of flattery, his discreet
deference, to the priesthood (illustrated by his annual pilgrimage, in
the garb of penance, to the shrine of Fatima at Kum), his royal state,
his jewels, and his ambrosial beard, form the background of every
contemporary work, and are vividly reproduced in these pages. The
royal processions, whether in semi-state when he visited the house of a
subject, or in full state when he went abroad from the capital, and
the annual departure of the royal household for the summer camp at
Sultanieh, are drawn from the life. Under the present Shah they have
been shorn of a good deal of their former splendour. The Grand Vizier
of the narrative, 'that notorious minister, decrepit in person,
and nefarious in conduct,' 'a little old man, famous for a hard and
unyielding nature,' was Mirza Sheffi who was appointed by Fath Ali
Shah to succeed if Ibrahim, the minister to whom his uncle had owed
his throne, and whom the nephew repaid by putting to death. The
Amin-ed-Dowleh, or Lord High Treasurer, 'a large, coarse man, and the
son of a greengrocer of Ispahan,' was Mohammed Hussein Khan, the second
personage of Court. Only a slight verbal change is needed to transform
Hajji Baba's master, Mirza Ahmak, the king's chief physician into
Mirza Ahmed, the _Hakim Bashi_ of Fath Ali Shah. Namerd Khan, the
chief executioner, and subsequent chief of the hero, whose swaggering
cowardice is so vividly depicted, was, in actual life, Feraj Ullah Khan.
The commander of the King's Camel Corps, who had to give up his house to
the British _Elchi_, was Mohammed Khan. The Poet Laureate of the story,
Asker Khan, shared the name of his sovereign, Fath Ali Khan; and the
story of his mouth being filled on one occasion with gold coins, and
stuffed on another with sugar-candy, as a mark of the royal approbation,
is true. The serdar of Erivan, 'an abandoned sensualist, but liberal
and enterprising,' was one Hassan Khan; and the romantic tale of the
Armenians, Yusu