Page:Historyofpersiaf00watsrich.djvu/273

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DISMAY OF THE SHAH AND THE CROWN-PRINCE.
253

massacred is stated to have been thirty-five, including M. Grebaiodoff, M. Adelung his second secretary, the physician of the mission, the Persian secretary, a Georgian prince attached to the mission, an officer in the Russian service, eleven Cossacks, an European servant, and several Armenians and Georgians. The body of the murdered envoy was handed over to the care of the Armenian clergy, and it was subsequently transported to Tiflis. The fate of this talented gentleman was the more melancholy from the reflection that but a few months before he had wedded a Georgian princess of remarkable beauty, who was thus early doomed to bemoan his untimely death. M. Grebaiodoff was a poet of considerable celebrity, and his works are still perused widely throughout the Czar's dominions. It may have been to this circumstance that he owed, as he is said to have done, the dislike of his Imperial master, who looked upon the pursuit of literature as being a mere waste of time, and unworthy of a soldier or a statesman.

Nothing could exceed the dismay into which the intelligence of this deplorable occurrence threw the crown- prince, Abbass Meerza, who was at the time at Tabreez. In the middle of the night a servant of the harem was despatched for the British envoy, to whom the prince, after many exclamations expressive of despair, declared that a deed had been done at Tehran, the stain of which all the waters of the Euphrates could not efface. The prince could find a grain of consolation only in the fact that the Mehmandar attached to the late Russian Minister had been severely wounded in his defence, whilst several of his Persian guards had been killed in the act of attempting to resist the rabble. The Shah and his