armies, artillery, and rockets, than that great prince who looks out
upon Europe and Asia through the loopholes of polar mists. Anti-Gog
will probably synchronize with the two Gogs. And Lord Auckland would
have earned the title of Anti-Gog, had he gone out to tilt on an
Affghan process of the Himalaya, with--what? With a reed shaken by the
wind? With a ghost, as did the grandfather of Ossian? With an _ens
rationis_, or logical abstraction? Not even with objects so palpable
as these, but with a Parisian lie and a London craze; with a word,
with a name, nay, with a _nominis umbra_. And yet we repeat a thousand
times, that, if Lord Auckland had been as mad as this earliest
hypothesis of the Affghan expedition would have made him, the bulk of
the English journals could have had no right to throw the first stone
against a policy which, at great cost of truth and honesty, they had
been promoting for years.

[1] "_Miserable Russian superstition_."--This is now, we believe,
decaying. But why? Not from sounder politics, but from more accurate
geography. The Affghan campaigns, with the affairs of Bokhara, of Khiva,
and Khoondooz, have lighted up as with torches those worlds of
wilderness and obstruction; so that, in any practical sense, people are
ashamed _now_ to talk of St Petersburg as threatening Delhi or Calcutta.

But, _secondly_, what was the amended hypothesis of that expedition? Not
Russia was contemplated, aërial Russia, but Affghanistan for
herself--_that_ was the object present to Lord Auckland's thoughts; no
phantom, but a real next-door neighbour in the flesh. The purpose was to
raise Affghanistan into a powerful barrier; and against what? Not
specially against so cloudy an apparition as Russia, but generally
against all enemies who might gather from the west; most of all,
perhaps, against the Affghans themselves. It must be known to many of