s tent. Then the Emir begged permission to
pay him a visit, which was to have lasted only a quarter of an hour;
but when Fakredeen had once established himself in the divan with his
nargileh, he never quitted it. It would have been difficult for Tancred
to have found a more interesting companion; impossible to have made an
acquaintance more singularly unreserved. His frankness was startling.
Tancred had no experience of such self-revelations; such a jumble of
sublime aspirations and equivocal conduct; such a total disregard
of means, such complicated plots, such a fertility of perplexed and
tenebrous intrigue! The animated manner and the picturesque phrase, too,
in which all this was communicated, heightened the interest and effect.
Fakredeen sketched a character in a sentence, and you knew instantly the
individual whom he described without any personal knowledge. Unlike the
Orientals in general, his gestures were as vivid as his words. He acted
the interviews, he achieved the adventures before you. His voice could
take every tone and his countenance every form. In the midst of all
this, bursts of plaintive melancholy; sometimes the anguish of a
sensibility too exquisite, alternating with a devilish mockery and a
fatal absence of all self-respect.

'It appears to me,' said Tancred, when the young Emir had declared his
star accursed, since, after the ceaseless exertions of years, he was
still as distant as ever from the accomplishment of his purpose, 'it
appears to me that your system is essentially erroneous. I do not
believe that anything great is ever effected by management. All this
intrigue, in which you seem such an adept, might be of some service in
a court or in an exclusive senate; but to free a nation you require
something more vigorous and more simple. This system of intrigue in
Europe is quite old-fashioned. It is one of the superstitions left us by
the wretched eighteenth century, a period when aristocracy was rampant
throughout Christendom; and what were the consequences? All faith in God
or man, all grandeur of purpose, all nobility of thought, and all beauty
of sentiment, withered and shrivelled up. Then the dexterous management
of a few individuals, base or dull, was the only means of success.
But we live in a different age: there are popular sympathies, however
imperfect, to appeal to; we must recur to the high primeval practice,
and address nations now as the heroes, and prophets, and legislators
of an