the inhuman Obeidullah struck him on the mouth with a cane. ‘Alas!’ exclaimed an aged Mussulman, ‘on these lips have I seen the lips of the Prophet of God!’ In a distant age and climate the tragic scene of the death of Huseyn will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader. On the annual festival of his martyrdom, in the devout pilgrimage to his sepulchre, his Persian votaries abandon their souls to the religious frenzy of sorrow and indignation.” The date of Huseyn’s death was the tenth of Muharram. The month is one of mourning throughout the Shiah world, every man and every woman wearing black, and Passion plays based on the tragedy of the Tent being performed in all the chief cities and even in the more important villages of Persia, while the day itself is made the occasion of a yearly outburst of grief, of rage, and of fanaticism, which is as unbridled as it is sincere. On this the Day of Cutting, processions bearing banners draped in black pass weeping through the streets; the Muslim Friars, or, to give them their true title, the Seyyid Rúsé Kháns, lead the way, rending their naked breasts with knives or with needles, and swelling the shouts of “Yá-Huseyn! Yá-Hasan!” with the refrains of their wildest hymns. The flow of blood drives the populace beside itself. In every thoroughfare men of the lower classes run to join the ranks of the mourners, laying bare their right shoulders and breasts to the weapons they carry. And soon every ward of every city in the country echoes and re-echoes, not less to the curses showered on the head of Omar, than to the cries in lamentation of ’Alí’s assassination, of Hasan’s murder, and of Huseyn’s martyrdom. The universal mourning animates the collective body of the nation as with one soul. If it is mixed with a mean hatred for a man of unrivalled integrity and force of character, it is still, as the expression of the nation’s love for its chosen hero, a sentiment of loyal devotion and enduring compassion. The noise of the grief over Huseyn’s remote death may ring discordant, unphilosophic, and almost barbaric, in these days of the lukewarm enthusiasms and uninspiring scepticism which sap the energies of the more cultured of mankind; but it rings all the more moving to those who can hear and understand. For “it is the noise of the mourning of a nation” mighty in its grief, as Lionel Tennyson has it.