Shah's little account. Strange to say, these are all on the wrong side--
all marked with the negative sign. The drollest of all was the charge
preferred against him by our Radicals. Possibly the Chartists, the
Leaguers, and the Repealers have something in reserve against him. What
the Radicals said was to this purpose: having heard of the Shah's
compulsory flight more than once from Affghanistan, they argued that
this never _could_ have happened had he not committed some horrible
_faux pas_. What could that be? "Something very naughty, be assured,"
said another; "they say he keeps a haram."--"Ay," rejoined a third, "but
they care little about that in the East. Take my word for it, he has
been playing tricks against the friends of liberty: he has violated the
'constitution' of Caboolistan." And immediately reverting to the case of
Charles X. under the counsels of Prince Polignac, they resolved that he
must have been engaged in suppressing the liberal journals of Peshawur;
and that the Khyberees, those noble parliamentary champions of the cause
for which Sidney bled on the scaffold, had risen as one man, and, under
tricolor banners, had led his horse by the bridle to the frontiers of
the Seiks. This was the colouring which the Radical journals gave to the
Shah's part in the affair; and naturally they could not give any other
than a corresponding one to ours. If Soojah were a tyrant kicked out for
his political misdeeds, we must be the vilest of his abettors, leading
back this _saevior exul_, reimposing a detested yoke, and facilitating a
bloody vengeance. O gentlemen, blockheads! _Silent inter arma leges_--
laws of every kind are mute; and as to such political laws as you speak
of, well for Affghanistan if, through European neighbourhood, she comes
to hear of those refinements in seven generations hence. Shah Soojah saw
in youth as many ups and downs as York and Lancaster; but all in the
good old honest way of throat-cutting, without any fraternal discord on
questions of _Habeas corpus_; and had he been a luckier man in his long
rough-and-tumbles for the Affghan sceptre, so as to have escaped the