where it lies) has a Sanskrit, but not yet (so far as we know) a Chinese, name; all those seas are filled with Indian shipping.—­And with Arab shipping, too, by the way; or are coming to be so; and spray of the Wave (in the shape of Indian and Arab ships) is falling in the port of Canton.  But China as a whole is in a deep trough of sea:  an intriguing, ceremonious, ultra-elegant, and wily-weak court and dynasty have lately been expelled from precarious sovereignty at Changan in the North to Nankin south of the Yangtse; there to abide a little while un-overturned, looking down in lofty impotent contempt on the uncouth Wether Huns, Tunguses, and Tibetans who are sharing and quarreling over the ancient seats of the Black-haired People in the Hoangho basin, after driving this same precious House of Tsin into the south.—­Persia is on the back of the Wave, something lower than the Crest:  Sapor II, a dozen or so years older than Samudragupta, has been on the throne since some months before his (Sapor’s) birth; and has now grown up into a particularly vigorous monarch; conquering here and there; persecuting the Christians with renewed energy since Constantine took them into favor;—­and of late years unmercifully banging about Constantius son of Constantine in the open field, and besieging and sometimes taking his fortresses.  This, you may say, with one hand:  with the other he has been very busy with his neighbors in the north-east, the nomads; he has been punishing them a little; and incidentally founding, as a protection against their in roads, the city of New Sapor in Khorassan,—­famed later as Nai-shapur, and the birthplace of a certain Tent-maker of song-rich memory.  In Armenia an Arsacid—­ that is, Parthian—­house has survived and holds sovereignty:  and Armenia is a sort of weak Belgium between Persia and Rome; inclining to the latter, of course, because ruled by Arsacids, who are the natural dynastic enemies of the Sassanids of Persia.  Rome has turned Christian; so, to cement his alliance with Rome and insure Roman aid against powerful Persia, the Armenian king has had himself coverted likewise, and his people follow suit with great piety;—­which sends Shah Sapor, King of the kings of Iran and Turan, Brother of the Sun and Moon, to it with a missionary as well as a dynastic zeal; and a war that is to be of nearly thirty years’ duration has been in process along the frontier since 336.  Persia, better called a kingdom, perhaps, than an empire, commands about forty millions of subjects; as against imperial Rome’s—­who can say?  The population there must have gone down by many millions since the days of the Antonines, with all the civil wars, plagues, pestilences, and famines that have harrowed the years between.