Previous to the year 1808 Afghanistan was practically a _terra incognita_ to Englishmen. Zemaun Shah, the once terrible Ameer whose threatened invasion had disturbed even the strong mind of Lord Wellesley, was, indeed, in their hands, living, dethroned and blinded, a pensioner on their bounty at Loodhianah, but of the country he had once ruled over and of the subjects who had driven him into exile but little was known in Calcutta and still less in London. Before the close of the eighteenth century but one Englishman had ever penetrated into that unknown land. Forster, a member of the Bengal Civil Service, in 1783-84 had crossed the Punjab to Cashmere, and thence had descended through the great Khyber and Koord-Cabul passes to the Afghan stronghold, whence journeying on by Ghuznee, Candahar, and Herat he had won his way to the borders of the Caspian Sea. His book was not published till some fifteen years after, and shows chiefly, to use Kaye's words, "how much during the last seventy years the Afghan Empire and how little the Afghan character is changed." But the labour and intelligence of one man, however much they may profit himself, have rarely by themselves added much to the knowledge of a nation. Many well-read Englishmen could still own to little more than a vague idea of Afghanistan; that it was a bare and rocky country, which the heat of summer and the cold of winter alike rendered impervious to travellers, happily shut out from more civilised regions by a mighty barrier of mountains, topped with eternal snow, through which, by passes inaccessible to all save the mountaineers themselves, hordes of savage warriors had in earlier days poured down in irresistible flood on the fertile valleys of the Indus. Elphinstone let in more light on the gloomy and mysterious scene. Though with his own eyes he saw but little of the country and the people, as his journey was stayed at Peshawur, he acquired from various sources a vast amount of information, which he reproduced with extraordinary distinctness. His book rapidly became the acknowledged text-book of the history and geography of the country, and may still be read with pleasure and studied with profit. It would have been well if one of the lessons he taught had been better laid to heart; and thirty years later his unfortunate namesake must have recalled with peculiar bitterness all he had once read of the ingrained treachery of the Afghan character. The mission was in itself entirely successful, though the rapid march of events soon neutralised, and eventually wholly destroyed its work. Shah Soojah, a name to be before many years but too familiar to English ears, received the envoys at Peshawur, then one of the chief cities of his kingdom. He appeared to them in royal state, seated on a golden throne, and blazing with jewels, chief among which shone forth in a gorgeous bracelet the mighty Koh-i-noor. Nor were the English outdone in magnificence. The