might have been expected, i.e. it is not a capital sentence for
this troublesome person. The punishment now allotted to him was one
which marked him out, most unfairly, as guilty of a common
misdemeanour--some act which would rightly disgust every educated
person. How, indeed, could any one adopt as his teacher one who had
actually been disgraced by the infliction of stripes? [Footnote:
Cp. Isaiah liii. 5.] If the Bab had been captured in battle,
bravely fighting, it might have been possible to admire him, but, as
Court politicians kept on saying, he was but 'a vulgar charlatan, a
timid dreamer.' [Footnote: Gobineau, p. 257.] According to Mirza
Jani, it was the Crown Prince who gave the order for stripes, but his
'_farrashes_ declared that they would rather throw themselves
down from the roof of the palace than carry it out.' [Footnote:
_NH_, p. 290.] Therefore the Sheykhu'l Islam charged a certain
Sayyid with the 'baleful task,' by whom the Messenger of God was
bastinadoed.

It seems clear, however, that there must have been a difference of
opinion among the advisers of the Shah, for shortly before Shah
Muhammad's death (which was impending when the Bab was in Tabriz)
we are told that Prince Mahdi-Kuli dreamed that he saw the Sayyid
shoot the Shah at a levee. [Footnote: _Ibid_. p. 355.]
Evidently there were some Court politicians who held that the Bab
was dangerous. Probably Shah Muhammad's vizier took the disparaging
view mentioned above (i.e. that the Bab was a mere mystic
dreamer), but Shah Muhammad's successor dismissed Mirza Akasi, and
appointed Mirza Taki Khan in his place. It was Mirza Taki Khan to
whom the Great Catastrophe is owing. When the Bab returned to his
confinement, now really rigorous, at Chihrik, he was still under the
control of the old, capricious, and now doubly anxious grand vizier,