In this formidable movement the highlander's natural freedom is fanned into a blaze by a religious zeal like that which once led the armies of Islam over one half of Asia and Europe. Although it reached its highest energy and a more consummate development under Schamyl, it was begun by his predecessors. Of the Mullah Mohammed, who first preached the duty of casting off the yoke of the Giaour, and the necessity of a religious reform and union of rival sects, as a means to that end, we have already spoken. This founder of the new system, an aged man, untrained in arms, never himself drew the sword in the cause; but was active in diffusing its principles and preparing a warlike rising by exhortations and letters circulated through all Daghestan. Suspected of these designs, he was seized, in 1826, by the orders of Jermoloff; and although be escaped,--by the connivance, it is said, of the native prince employed to capture him,--he afterward lived, in a kind of concealment, for some years. The post of Imam was thereupon assumed by a priest who was able to fight for the new doctrine as well as to preach it. The first armed outbreak took place under Kasi-Mullah, about the year 1829; from which time, until his death in a battle at Himry, in 1831, he waged a terrible, and, although often defeated, a virtually successful warfare, against the Russians, while he prosecuted the work of conversion among the tribes of Islam who delayed to acknowledge his mission, and to join in his enmity to the Russians, by the extremities of bloodshed and rapine. His death, after an heroic resistance, was hailed as a triumph by the Russians. They counted on the extinction of the new sect in the defeat of its leader, whose dead body they carried about the country to prove the imposture of his pretensions. This piece of barbarism produced an effect the reverse of what they expected. The venerable face of the Imam, the attitude in which he had expired, with one hand pointed as if to heaven, was more impressive to those who crowded round the body than his fearless enthusiasm had been,--and thousands who till then had held aloof, now joined his followers in venerating him as a prophet. Of this first warrior-priest of Daghestan, Schamyl was the favorite disciple and the most trusted soldier. Kasi-Mullah was not killed until Schamyl had already fallen as it seemed, under several deadly wounds:--his reappearance after this bloody scene was but the first of many similar escapes, the report of which sounds like a fable. He did not, however, at once succeed to the dignity of Imam: the office was usurped for more than a year by Hamsad Beg (Bey), whose rapacious and savage treatment of some of the princely families of Daghestan nearly caused a fatal reaction against the new sect, and the destruction of its main support, the Murids. Hamsad Beg performed no action of consequence against the Russians; but expended his rage upon the