lden flower on a
ground of delicate green.

'I will send your people to you,' said Fakredeen; 'but, in the meantime,
there are attendants here who are, perhaps, more used to the duty;' and,
so saying, he clapped his hands, and several servants appeared, bearing
baskets of curious linen, whiter than the snow of Lebanon, and a variety
of robes.

CHAPTER XLII.

_Strange Ceremonies._

IT HAS been long decreed that no poet may introduce the Phoenix. Scylla
and Charybdis are both successfully avoided even by provincial rhetoric.
The performance of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted, and Mahomet's
unhappy coffin, these are illustrations that have long been the
prerogative of dolts and dullards. It is not for a moment to be
tolerated that an oasis should be met with anywhere except in the
desert.

We sadly lack a new stock of public images. The current similes, if
not absolutely counterfeit, are quite worn out. They have no intrinsic
value, and serve only as counters to represent the absence of ideas.
The critics should really call them in. In the good old days, when the
superscription was fresh, and the mint mark bright upon the metal, we
should have compared the friendship of two young men to that of Damon
and Pythias. These were individuals then still well known in polite
society. If their examples have ceased to influence, it cannot
be pretended that the extinction of their authority has been the
consequence of competition. Our enlightened age has not produced them
any rivals.

Of all the differences between the ancients and ourselves, none more
striking than our respective ideas of friendship. Grecian friendship
was indeed so ethereal, that it is difficult to define its essential
qualities. They must be sought rather in the pages of Plato, or the
moral essays of Plutarch perhaps, and in some other books not quite
as well known, but not less interesting and curious. As for modern
friendship, it will be found in clubs. It is violent at a house
dinner, fervent in a cigar shop, full of devotion at a cricket or a
pigeon-match, or in the gathering of a steeple-chase. The nineteenth
century is not entirely sceptical on the head of friendship, but fears
'tis rare. A man may have friends, but then, are they sincere ones?
Do not they abuse you behind your back, and blackball you at societies
where they have had the honour to propose you? It might philosophically
be suggested that it is more agreeable to be ab