and religion on the one side, with the tenderest and most ill-starred love on the other; the manners of Mahometans with those of Christians; the court of a soldan with that of a king of France; and to cause Frenchmen to appear for the first time upon the tragic stage."
The plot of the piece, forming a very pretty and ingenious tale, will be best condensed from his own sketch of it, written for a friend:—
Palestine had been wrested from the Christian princes by Saladin. Noradin, of Tartar race, had then rendered himself master of it. Orosman, son of Noradin, a young man full of greatness, virtue, and passion, began to reign with glory in Jerusalem. He had brought to the Syrian throne the spirit of liberty of his ancestors. He despised the rigid rules of the seraglio, and did not desire to augment his dignity by remaining invisible to strangers and to his subjects. He treated Christian slaves with mildness. Among them was a child, taken in Noradin's reign, in the sack of Cæsarea. This child having been recovered, at the age of nine, by the Christians, was brought to St Louis, the king of France, who undertook the charge of bringing him up. He took in France the name of Nerestan, and, returning to Syria, was again made prisoner, and shut up among the slaves of Orosman, and here he met once more in slavery a girl with whom he had been captured in Cæsarea. This girl, Zaire, was ignorant, as well as Nerestan, of her birth; she only knew that she had been born a Christian, as he and some other slaves a little older than herself assured her. She had always preserved an ornament which enclosed a cross, the only proof that she possessed of her religion. Another slave, Fatima, born a Christian, and placed in the seraglio at the age of ten, imparted to Zaire what little she knew herself of the religion of her fathers. Young Nerestan, who was free to see Zaire and Fatima, animated with the zeal then proper to French cavaliers, and with the tenderest friendship for Zaire, sought
