the Preobasinsky dragoons. How often in this journal have we been
obliged to draw upon these blockheads, and disperse them sword in hand!
How, gentlemen, (we have said to them in substance,) if you must play
the fool as alarmists, can you find no likelier towers for menacing
Calcutta with thunder storms than those of arctic St Petersburg; between
which cities lies an interspace equal to both tropics? We remember, as
applicable to this case, a striking taunt reported by Dampier, that when
one bucanier, on the west coast of Peru, was sailing away from the
oppression of another to some East Indian port, with a weak crew in a
crazy vessel, the ruffian from whom he fled told him at parting, that,
by the time he saw green fields again, the boys in his vessel would be
greyheaded. And we suspect that the Russian drummer-boys, by the time
they reach the Khyber pass, will all have become field-marshals, seeing
that, after three years' marching, they have not yet reached Khiva. But
were the distance, the snows, the famine, and thirst nothing, is the
bloodshed nothing? Russia is a colossus, and Bokhara, Khiva, Kokan, &c.,
are dwarfs. But the finger of a colossus may be no match for the horny
heels of a dwarf. The Emperor Tiberius could fracture a boy's skull with
a _talitrum_, (or fillip of his middle finger;) but it is not every
middle finger that can do that; and a close kick from a khan of
Toorkistan might leave an uglier scar than a fillip at arm's length from
the Czar. Assuredly his imperial majesty would be stopped at many
toll-bars before he would stable his horses in an Affghan caravansery;
and would have more sorts of boxes than diamond snuff-boxes to give and
take in approaching the Hindoo Koosh. But suppose him there, and
actually sitting astride of the old Koosh in boots and spurs, what next?
In our opinion, the best thing he could do, in case, he desired any
sleep for the next three months, would be to stay where he was; for
should he come down stairs into Affghanistan, we English can by this
time give some account of the shocking roads and bad entertainment for