personal. The Dost was the favourite--which was generous--as he had no
solitary merit to plead except that he had lost the election; or, as the
watchmaker's daughter so pointedly said on behalf of Nigel Lord
Glenvarloch, "Madam, he is unfortunate." Searching, however, in all
corners for the undiscovered virtues of the Dost, as Bruce for the coy
fountains of the Nile, one man reported by telegraph that he had
unkenneled a virtue; that he had it fast in his hands, and would forward
it overland. He did so; and what was it? A certain pedlar, or he might
be a bagman, had said--upon the not uncommon accident in Cabool of
finding himself pillaged--"What! is there no justice to be had amongst
you? Is Dost Mohammed dead?" Upon which rather narrow basis was
immediately raised in London a glorious superstructure to the justice of
the Dost. Certainly, if the Dost's justice had ever any reference to
pedlars, it must have been a nervous affection of penitential panic
during some fit of the cholera, and as transient as the measles; his
regard for pedlars being notoriously of that kind which tigers bear to
shoulders of lamb; and Cabool has since rung with his pillagings of
caravans. But we believe the pedlar's _mot_ to have been thoroughly
misconceived. If we see a poor man bleeding to death in a village lane,
we naturally exclaim--"What! is Dr Brown, that used to practise here,
gone away?" Not meaning that the doctor could have stopped the
hemorrhage, but simply that the absence of all medical aid is shocking,
and using the doctor's name merely as a shorthand expression for that
aid. Now in the East, down from scriptural days, the functions of a
sovereign were two--to lead his people in battle, and to "sit in the
gate" for the distribution of justice. Our pedlar, therefore, when
invoking Dost Mahommed as the redresser of his wrongs, simply thought
of him as the public officer who bore the sword of justice. "He cried to
Pharaoh," or he "cried to Artaxerxes"--did not imply any reliance in
their virtue as individuals, but merely an appeal to them as