at all surprise the customer; who, in turn, offers
a twentieth part of the price he is willing to
pay. Both parties then begin to make the
bargain the principal object of their lives, and
will invent the most extraordinary stories to
avoid concluding it. They will hide away from
each other for days to obtain better terms, or
in mere wantonness. No transaction can be
ended without a large concourse of people being
mixed up in it, and oceans of talk and
manoeuvring. The Persians have no idea of the
worth of time. Nobody ever dreams of keeping
an appointment.

The Persians are, moreover, a remarkably
impudent people—of a naïve and simple kind
of impudence very provoking. A short time
ago they had just found out an odd trick of
answering diplomatic correspondents on every
subject by sending them literal word for word
translations out of Vattel and Martens. For a
long time foreigners could not understand where
upon earth this light-headed people obtained the
dreary erudition which they so ostentatiously
displayed upon all occasions. But at last it was
discovered that there was an obscure meerza (scribe)
then employed in their Foreign Office who was
entrusted with the task of puzzling their
correspondents. His method was simple and effective.
Whenever foreign diplomatists sent a
despatch, this person referred to one of the old
French or German casuists for anything which
might directly or indirectly be construed into
language having reference to the subject upon
which they had written, and then he came down
upon them with a bulky essay which was of
course no answer at all. They had also a certain
childish craft in their dealings with foreigners,
and were in the habit of menacing Europeans
in any difficulty with the anger of the mob,
referring to the massacre of the Russian embassy,
in 1828, with open triumph. They kept this
threat in constant readiness for them as a kind
of bogey.

Business of all kinds is of course much
impeded by the general want of education and
the difficulty of correspondence. The meerzas
are a class apart, and pursuing a distinct
and recognised profession—the immemorial
Oriental calling of the scribe. Letters and
other documents, instead of being folded for
transmission, are closely rolled and are sealed
by means of a narrow strip of strong paper like
a piece of ribbon or tape wound tightly around
the middle of the roll and attached by a species
of wax or gum. A seal bearing the name or
titles of the writer is sometimes impressed with
ink upon the roll where it is fastened. The
superscription is written with the pen near one
end. The seal with ink is used within, instead
of the written signature of the author; though
sometimes both are inserted. The extensive
use and high importance of the seal in the
East forcibly illustrates the figures of Scripture,
which attach to it such sacred solemnity and
authority. The profession of the meerzas is an
important one, the higher classes in Persia
disliking the drudgery of using the pen, and the
lower orders being too ignorant to do their
own writing. The lower class of merchants
usually keep their accounts, write their own
letters, and use their own seal; but all the large
traders employ meerzas.

The principal merchants carry on their
business with a cypher, and every person has a
different one. For in a country where there are
no regular posts, their letters must be trusted
to couriers, who might be easily bribed by a
small sum to betray their secrets to commercial
rivals; and it is of great consequence that they
should have the first intelligence of political
changes about which they would fear to write
openly. The authenticity of a merchant's letters,
as of his bills, depends entirely upon the seal.
It is not usual to sign either; and they are not
often written in the hand of the person who
sends them, so that it is the seal only which is
of importance. Engraven upon it is the name
and the title, if he has one, of the person it
belongs to, and the date when it was cut. The
occupation of seal-cutter is one of much trust
and some danger. The seal-cutter keeps a register
of every seal he makes, and if one is stolen or lost
by the party to whom he sold it, his life would
answer for the crime of making another exactly
the same. The person to whom it belongs, if in
business, is obliged to take the most respectable
witnesses of the occurrence, and to write to his
correspondents declaring all accounts and
business with his former seal null from the day upon
which it was lost.

Copying manuscripts also opens a wide field
of labour for the meerzas, as well as for the
lower orders of the mollahs. The Persian pen
is a small hollow reed instead of a quill; the
latter would be likely to cut the paper in the
heavy hand of Eastern penmen.

The beauty of Persian manuscripts has long
been celebrated. Sir William Jones was so
enraptured with them that he almost wished the
art of printing had never been invented. The
Persians are able to write with a fineness and
distinctness that utterly defy imitation with
type. I have seen the whole of the Koran
written on two strips of fine Chinese paper three
inches wide, and perhaps ten feet long, written
not "within and without," but only on one
side, which, when rolled up, made a roll a little
larger than the finger. Still every letter was
fully formed and perfectly legible. The Persians
now usually write their manuscripts in the form
of volumes rather than rolls. And the art of
printing is rapidly superseding the profession of
copyists. Some of the Nestorians are also
able to use their pen with elegance, and the
bolder stroke and square form of the Syriac
character which they use, appear in even finer
relief than the Persian letters. It would need
good paper and good type to compete with these
copyists in matters of taste sufficiently to meet
the fastidiousness of "old school" men, and
particularly of the copyists themselves; whose
business is so much endangered by the innovation
of printing. The process of writing by hand in
this elegant style is of course very slow; and