nd profound channel. His steps paused; he took not
his eyes from the ground; once or twice he smiled joyously, and then, as
he turned from his place of vigil, and sought his couch, he muttered,
'If death frowns so near, I will say at least that I have lived--Ione
shall be mine!'

The character of Arbaces was one of those intricate and varied webs, in
which even the mind that sat within it was sometimes confused and
perplexed. In him, the son of a fallen dynasty, the outcast of a sunken
people, was that spirit of discontented pride, which ever rankles in one
of a sterner mould, who feels himself inexorably shut from the sphere in
which his fathers shone, and to which Nature as well as birth no less
entitles himself. This sentiment hath no benevolence; it wars with
society, it sees enemies in mankind. But with this sentiment did not go
its common companion, poverty. Arbaces possessed wealth which equalled
that of most of the Roman nobles; and this enabled him to gratify to the
utmost the passions which had no outlet in business or ambition.
Travelling from clime to clime, and beholding still Rome everywhere, he
increased both his hatred of society and his passion for pleasure. He
was in a vast prison, which, however, he could fill with the ministers
of luxury. He could not escape from the prison, and his only object,
therefore, was to give it the character of the palace. The Egyptians,
from the earliest time, were devoted to the joys of sense; Arbaces
inherited both their appetite for sensuality and the glow of imagination
which struck light from its rottenness. But still, unsocial in his
pleasures as in his graver pursuits, and brooking neither superior nor
equal, he admitted few to his companionship, save the willing slaves of
his profligacy. He was the solitary lord of a crowded harem; but, with
all, he felt condemned to that satiety which is the constant curse of
men whose intellect is above their pursuits, and that which once had
been the impulse of passion froze down to the ordinance of custom.
From the disappointments of sense he sought to raise himself by the
cultivation of knowledge; but as it was not his object to serve mankind,
so he despised that knowledge which is practical and useful. His dark
imagination loved to exercise itself in those more visionary and obscure
researches which are ever the most delightful to a wayward and solitary
mind, and to which he himself was invited by the daring pride of