his affections were warm and generous, his nature calm and gentle; and,
though early power, and the painful experience of a mutinous people and
ungrateful court, had imparted to that nature an irascibility of temper
and a quickness of suspicion foreign to its earlier soil, he was easily
led back to generosity and justice; and, if warm in resentment, was
magnanimous in forgiveness. Deeply accomplished in all the learning of
his race and time, he was--in books, at least--a philosopher; and,
indeed, his attachment to the abstruser studies was one of the main
causes which unfitted him for his present station. But it was the
circumstances attendant on his birth and childhood that had perverted his
keen and graceful intellect to morbid indulgence in mystic reveries, and
all the doubt, fear, and irresolution of a man who pushes metaphysics
into the supernatural world. Dark prophecies accumulated omens over his
head; men united in considering him born to disastrous destinies.
Whenever he had sought to wrestle against hostile circumstances, some
seemingly accidental cause, sudden and unforeseen, had blasted the
labours of his most vigorous energy,--the fruit of his most deliberate
wisdom. Thus, by degrees a gloomy and despairing cloud settled over his
mind; but, secretly sceptical of the Mohammedan creed, and too proud and
sanguine to resign himself wholly and passively to the doctrine of
inevitable predestination, he sought to contend against the machinations
of hostile demons and boding stars, not by human but spiritual agencies.
Collecting around him the seers and magicians of orient-fanaticism, he
lived in the visions of another world; and, flattered by the promises of
impostors or dreamers, and deceived by his own subtle and brooding
tendencies of mind, it was amongst spells and cabala that he thought to
draw forth the mighty secret which was to free him from the meshes of the
preternatural enemies of his fortune, and leave him the freedom of other
men to wrestle, with equal chances, against peril and adversities. It
was thus, that Almamen had won the mastery over his mind; and, though