Crusaders. One of their chief religious doctrines was that of divine
incarnations. It seems to have originated in the pretension of Hakeem to
be himself one; and as organized by the Persian mystic Hamzi, his Vizier
and disciple, it included ten manifestations of this kind, of which
Hakeem must have formed the last. Mr. Browning has assumed that in any
great national emergency, the miracle would be expected to recur; and he
has here conceived an emergency sufficiently great to call it forth.

The Druses, according to him, have colonized a small island belonging
to the Knights of Rhodes, and become subject to a Prefect appointed by
the Order. This Prefect has almost extirpated the Druse sheikhs, and
made the remainder of the tribe victims of his cruelty and lust. The cry
for rescue and retribution, if not loud, is deep. It finds a passionate
response in the soul of Djabal, a son of the last Emir, who escaped as a
child from the massacre of his family, and took refuge in Europe; and
who now returns, with a matured purpose of patriotic and personal
revenge. He has secured an ally in the young Lois de Dreux--an intended
Knight of the Order, and son of a Breton Count, whose hospitality he has
enjoyed--and induced him to accompany him to the islet, and pass his
probation there. This, he considers, will facilitate the murder of the
Prefect, which is an essential part of his plan; and he has obtained the
promise of the Venetians, who are hostile to the Knights, to lend their
ships for his countrymen's escape as soon as the death of the tyrant
shall have set them free.

So far his course is straight. But he has scarcely returned home, when
he falls in love with Anael, a Druse girl, whose devotion to her tribe
is a religion, and who is determined to marry none but the man who will
deliver it; and he is then seized by an impulse to heighten the act of
deliverance by a semblance of more than human power. He declares himself