compass of a ring.

Its Comedy.

But there is another side to their imaginings. When the Magian has done
beating his copper drum--(how its mysterious murmur still haunts the
echoes of memory!)--when Queen Lab has finished her tremendous
conjurations, wonder gives place to laughter, the apotheosis of the flesh
to the spirit of comedy. The enchanter turns harlequin; and what the
lovers ask is not the annihilation of time and space but only that the
father be at his prayers, or the husband gone on a fool's errand, while
they have leave to kiss each other's mouths, 'as a pigeon feedeth her
young,' to touch the lute, strip language naked, and 'repeat the
following verses' to a ring of laughing girls and amid all such comfits
and delicates as a hungry audience may rejoice to hear enumerated. And
the intrigue begins, and therewith the presentment of character, the
portraiture of manners. Merry ladies make love to their gallants with
flowers, or scorn them with the huckle-bones of shame; the Mother Coles
of Araby pursue the unwary stranger for their mistress' pleasure; damsels
resembling the full moon carouse with genial merchants or inquiring
calenders. The beast of burden, even the porter, has his hour: he goes
the round at the heels of a veiled but beautiful lady, and lays her in
the materials of as liberal and sumptuous a carouse as is recorded in
history. Happy lady, and O thrice-fortunate porter! enviable even to the
term of time! It is a voluptuous farce, a masque and anti-masque of
wantonness and stratagem, of wine-cups and jewels and fine raiment, of
gaudy nights and amorous days, of careless husbands and adventurous
wives, of innocent fathers and rebel daughters and lovers happy or
befooled. And high over all, his heart contracted with the spleen of the
East, the tedium of supremacy, towers the great Caliph Haroun, the buxom
and bloody tyrant, a Muslim Lord of Misrule. With Giafar, the finest
gentleman and goodliest gallant of Eastern story, and Mesrour, the well-
beloved, the immortal Eunuch, he goes forth upon his round in the
enchanted streets of Bagdad, like Francois Premier in the maze of old-
time Paris. The night is musical with happy laughter and the sound of
lutes and voices; it is seductive with the clink of goblets and the odour
of perfumes: not a shadow but has its secret, or jovial or amorous or
terrible: here falls a head, and there you may note the contrapuntal
effect of the bastinado.