The Envoy had hired, as before noticed, for his Persian secretary, a mild moderate man, who appeared to have both good sense and good principle: but although some time had elapsed, and I had watched him narrowly without discerning a flaw, I attributed this to his art, and I therefore gave little heed to his reasoning when he used to plead for his countrymen, urging (as he often did), that, from our being strangers, and from our reputation for wealth, generosity, and inexperience, we were naturally exposed to the attacks of the cunning and designing, from whose conduct we drew general inferences, which were not quite fair. "We are not all so bad as you think us," the good Aga Meer used to say, with a smile; "we have some redeeming characters; these may be rare, but still they exist; but that, you English will as yet hardly believe." He used frequently to mention to me, as one, a relation of his own, the Shaikh-ool-Islâm, or Chief Judge and Priest of Shiraz: "He was," he said, "a person who combined sense and information with piety and humility. He has never come," added he, "like these greedy nobles and hungry poets, to prey upon the munificence of the Elchee; and when the latter, hearing that his sight was weak, sent him a pair of spectacles beautifully mounted in silver, he returned them, requesting a pair set in common tortoise-shell." Though I heard the account of this paraded humility with a smile, I was very happy to find we were to meet this paragon of modest merit at a breakfast, to which Mahomed Hoosein Khan, the son of the minister Hajee Ibrahim, had invited the Envoy.