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308 A HISTORY OF PERSIA. messenger from Kandahar, with letters from Kohendil Khan, the brother of Dost Mahomed, containing the promise of aid from that quarter. The bearer of the letters assured the Shah, too, that he had nothing to fear from the direction of Cabul. A few days later Mr. McNeill sought a private audience of the king, and represented the imprudence of the line of conduct he was adopting, inasmuch as it tended to alienate from him the sympathy and friendship of Great Britain. Several causes of complaint against the Persian Government had arisen out of the difference of opinion between it and the British Government respecting the advisability of the siege of Herat. The numerous embassies which had successively been sent from England or from India to the Persian court ; the costly presents which had been lavished upon Fetteh Ali Shah and his Ministers ; and the stipulations which had been agreed to with respect to furnishing Persia with money and arms in the event of the occurrence of certain contin- gencies : all these had combined to establish in the mind of Mahomed Shah, and in that of his Minister, the idea that Great Britain placed a very high value on the friendship of Persia ; and that rather than break the alliance between the two States, and so drive Persia into the arms of Eussia, England would suffer almost any amount of neglect and indignity. The Shah and his Minister soon found that they had been mistaken in their estimate of the long-suffering of England. As subsidies were at this time no longer paid to Persia by the representative of the Governments of England and of India, there was a disposition on the part of the Shah's Government to make that representative feel his