'The pale-faced Frank among them sits: what brought him from afar?
Nor bears he bales of merchandise, nor teaches arts of war.
One pearl alone he brings with him—the Book of life and death.
One warfare only teaches he—to fight the fight of faith.'

Matters, however, improved after a while; the Armenian ladies came to kiss his hand, and the priest incensed him four times over at the altar. Here, on the 24th February, 1812, he completed, under most discouraging circumstances, his translation of the New Testament into Persian.[111] After labouring 'for six weary moons,' a similar version of the Psalms was finished in the following month; and on the 24th May, 'the meek missionary of the Cross' left Shiraz in order to present the precious documents himself to the Shah. Much difficulty and delay intervened on account of the diplomatic formalities considered necessary on such an occasion; and eventually, after visiting Ispahan and Teheran, Martyn was disappointed in the object he had in view, having been struck down by illness, increased by the hardships of travel and climate, before his desires were accomplished. For two months he was completely laid up—weeping many 'tears from the depths of a divine despair'—at the house of Sir Gore Ouseley, the British Ambassador at Tabriz, who afterwards had the gratification of showing Martyn's manuscript to the Shah, and it was sent to St. Petersburg to be printed.

This renewed illness caused Martyn to determine on returning to England, for his health's sake. But it was too late. On his homeward way (viâ Constantinople), seeing Mount Ararat on the journey, and passing through Erivan, Kars, Erzeroum, and Tokat—'hardly knowing how to keep his life in him'—he succumbed near the latter place, to hunger, thirst, sunstroke, fever and ague, aggravated by his desperate gallop for life across the scorching plains, and beneath a rainless sky, untempered by a single cloud, on the 6th October, 1812, in the thirty-second year of his age. Here the last entry, commencing 'Oh! when shall Time give place to Eternity?' appears in his sad, self-searching diary. Ten days afterwards he was no more.

He was buried in the Armenian burial-ground at Tokat, with the honours usually accorded by Armenian Christians to an Archbishop; and a marble slab, which the Tokat Christians were wont to keep clear of weeds, covers his remains. Sir R. K. Porter, in his 'Travels in Persia' (vol. ii., p. 703), after eulogizing Martyn's self-devotion and zeal beyond the strength of a naturally delicate constitution, adds that 'exhausted nature sank under the apostolic labour, and in this place he was called to the rest of heaven. His remains sleep in a grave as humble as his own meekness.'

Would it be too much to say of him

'Heaven scarce believed the conquest it surveyed;
And Saints with wonder heard the vows he made'?

Wordsworth's lines, at least, on another devoted son of the Church, are clearly appropriate to Martyn:

'He sought not praise, and praise did overlook
His inobtrusive merit; but his life,
Sweet to himself, was exercised in good
That shall survive his name and memory.'

His tomb is still, I believe, piously regarded by the natives, and it has been adorned by Lord Macaulay with the following lines: