I was very much amused with the airs the Persian king put on, as he went about bedizened with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and other jewels. Although his dynasty had been founded by a condottiere of the lowest rank, viz., Mehemmed Aga Khan, and as grandson of Feth Ali Shah, a cousin of this Aga Khan's, he was only the fourth Kadjar on the throne of Iran, he always wanted to parade the antiquity of his race. Before me he especially prided himself on his descent from the Mongol chief, Kadjar Noyan, and when I dared to question the correctness of this genealogy, merely brought forward by Persian historians to flatter their monarch, he looked at me quite angrily and ejaculated that "the sovereigns of the West were nothing but parvenus compared to their brother monarchs of the East." Persia, in fact, is the only land in Moslem Asia which can boast of a hereditary nobility, in a miserable condition, it is true, for not only Khans and Mirzas, but even royal princes may be found as drivers, house servants, and artisans of various kinds, but this does not prevent one from being proud of one's noble blood, and when Nasreddin Shah was in a good temper he expressed his astonishment that European counts, princes, and dukes attempted to be on a familiar footing with him, who could find his equal only among crowned heads. It is curious that the Turks even, who on account of their nomadic antecedents have never had any hereditary nobility, always try to make themselves out as aristocrats. Sultan Abdul Medjid was highly pleased when the French poet Lamartine, whom he had invited to his court and afterwards presented with a country seat near Brussa, called his attention to the fact that after the Bourbons the Osmanli was the oldest dynasty in Europe. The high dignitaries of the Porte, frequently tracing their descent from simple peasants, labourers, or shepherds, had at one time serious thoughts of setting up coats-of-arms, and much regretted the religious restriction which forbids their taking some animal for their device. Human weakness is after all the same in the East and in the West, and in spite of the strongly democratic tendencies of the Arabian prophet, we may yet live to see Islam adopting hereditary nobility with many other evils of European culture. In the personality of Nasreddin Shah I have always detected this curious mixture of East and West, of the old and the new aspect of life which we find in so many neophytes of European culture in the Moslemic East. The Iranian despot held in particular favour Malcolm Khan and Jahya Khan, and the Europeans who for a time were physicians in ordinary to his Majesty.