Of course, a hue and cry was raised in all directions, but totally in vain. Riza Bey, the Persian Shah, and the gentlemen in flower-pots, had "gone glimmering through the dream of things that were." L'etat c'est moi had been sold for thirty cents! It was afterward believed that a noted barber and suspected bandit at Leghorn, who had once really traveled in Persia, and there picked up the knowledge and the ready money that served his turn, was the perpetrator of this pretty joke and speculation, as he disappeared from his native city about the time of the embassy in France, and did not return. All Europe laughed heartily at the Grand Monarque and his fair court-dames, and "An Embassy from Persia" was for many years thereafter an expression similar to "Walker!" in English, or "Buncombe!" in American conversation, when the party using it seeks to intimate that the color of his optics is not a distinct pea-green! IX. RELIGIOUS HUMBUGS. CHAPTER XLIV. DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND; OR, YANKEE SUPERSTITIONS.--MATTHIAS THE IMPOSTOR.--NEW YORK FOLLIES THIRTY YEARS AGO. There is a story that on a great and solemn public occasion of the Romish Church, a Pope and a Cardinal were, with long faces, performing some of the gyrations of the occasion, when, instead of a pious ejaculation and reply, which were down in the programme, one said to the other gravely, in Latin "_mundus vult decipi_;" and the other replied, with equal gravity and learning, "_decipiatur ergo_:" that is, "All the world chooses to be fooled."--"Let it be fooled then." This seems, perhaps, a reasonable way for priests to talk about ignorant Italians. It may seem inapplicable to cool, sharp, school-trained Protestant Yankees. It is not, however--at least, not entirely. Intelligent Northerners have, sometimes, superstition enough in them to make a first-class Popish saint. If it had not been so, I should not have such an absurd religious humbug to tell of as Robert Matthews, notorious in our goodly city some thirty years ago as "Matthias, the Impostor." In the summer of 1832, there was often seen riding in Broadway, in a handsome barouche, or promenading on the Battery (usually attended by a sort of friend or servant,) a tall man, of some forty years of age, quite thin, with sunken, sharp gray eyes, with long, coarse, brown and gray hair, parted in the middle and curling on his shoulders, and a long and coarse but well-tended beard and mustache. These Esau-like adornments attracted much attention in those close-shaving days. He was commonly dressed in a fine green frock-coat, lined with white or pink satin, black or green pantaloons, with polished Wellington boots drawn on outside, fine cambric ruffles and frill, and a crimson silk sash worked with gold and with twelve tassels, for the twelve tribes of Israel. On his head was a steeple-crowned patent-leather shining black cap with a shade.