The Master of the Magicians deals with court life in Babylon in the time of Nebuchadnezzar, with the captive Daniel as the central figure, and, like a bright thread running through the more somber structure of the web, is a simple, but touching love tale, an idyl skillfully intertwined with the sterner situations of the case, in the fact that Daniel, nay even the queen herself, are by no means uninterested spectators of the tender drama. Without labored description, the scenes and customs of the country are placed vividly before us, and we live and move and have our being in dreamy, sunny Babylonia, in that curious combination of barbarity and civilization, in the gorgeous ceremonial and display, allied to the revolting back scenes which characterized courts of the period in question. The king, a man of moods and fancies, and troubled with prolonged insomnia, which, combined with other causes, eventually culminates in madness, is marked with a ferocity and moroseness hardly human; but, as so often occurs with relentless natures, he who one moment for a mere whim would slay by hundreds, would again be gentle and tractable as a little child. Even when he is afflicted with lycanthropy, we find him fondling a pet lamb, which he, however, tears to pieces in a fit. The loving side of his nature is also brought out strongly in his relations to his beautiful, but popularly hated and mistrusted queen. Perfectly cognizant as he must have been of his wife's intrigues and alliances, aware of her uncultured, shallow intelligence, her frivolity and caprice, her petty jealousy, her vindictiveness and brutal cruelty, and all the other vices which went to make up a despicable woman, yet the king yielded her undeviating respect and devotion, and, thoughtful for her every comfort, set himself the gigantic task of constructing the marvelous hanging gardens in the space of thirty days, solely to gratify her longing for the cool mountain breezes of her early Median home-a construction, alas, at an awful sacrifice of human life! The constancy of his favor to the captive Daniel was perhaps tinctured by fear of Daniel's God; but nothing of this kind detracts from his leniency and forbearance to the girl petitioner, and at the escapades of the brave, but hasty Sasa. The ascetic, saintly temperament of the learned hero, subject to strange, uncontrollable, prophetic trances, his moral intrepidity, his abstinence from the witcheries of the court-the more to be wondered at when we consider how they must have appealed to the ardent Jewish nature-the nobility of his conduct towards, and the relinquishment, of Lalitha; the man of fashion as typified in Allit; the simple, grand, yet feeble, scholarly mystic philosopher, Mutasaili; the innocence, the purity, the exquisite beauty, the grace, the naiveté and quiet dignity, which envelop his young daughter, Lalitha, in an indefinable, but wholly delightful glamour, affecting all with whom she came in contact, and more especially the change it wrought in Allit-all these are characters well drawn and forcibly contrasted. The polytheism of the country, with its strenuous adherents in the king and Mutasaili, the anguish of their doubts and difficulties, the desperate struggle of pride and habit to retain what intelligence denied, its final overthrow before the Jehovah of the Jew, and the consequent overwhelming despair, the burning shame and humiliation of the two men-not in their own eyes alone, but in sight of each other and in that of the people, and which, among other causes, cost one devotee his life, the other his reason-all this constitutes elements for a story which is as admirably conceived as it is forcibly related. - The Asiatic Quarterly Review