SKEPTICISM INCREASING.

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noted, as Tabari observes, for the increase of heresies, owing probably to the growth of the Persian influences. There had come to be many who horrified the orthodox by expressing skepticism about the Koran and the prophet, immortality and paradise, and indulging in unseemly pleasantries over the subjects of fasts and prayers.

Hedi was promptly proclaimed kalif in the room of his father in 785; and the ever restless Alyites took immediate steps towards revolution in their own favor. It happened that they made their demonstration at Mecca at the time of pilgrimage, when the city was filled with men from all portions of the kalifate, and naturally many of the partisans of the Abbassides were among them. A bloody struggle between the factions ensued, and the unfortunate children of Ali were again defeated.

Hedi was destined to enjoy the supreme authority but a few months, and most of his attention was given to putting down certain atheists, nihilists, or materialists, and in making the succession secure to his eldest son, against the known wishes of his father. This design was frustrated by Kalid, who felt the tenderness of a teacher for his pupil, and remembered also the benefits that he had received from Mehdi. Hedi did not live in friendly relations with his mother, who, he thought, exercised too much influence in government. In consequence of this ill-feeling, he endeavored to poison her; but his design was discovered and he was himself smothered with pillows in the year 786, after a reign of only fifteen months, at the age of twenty-six years.

XXXVII.

AARON THE ORTHODOX.

We have now reached that brilliant period in the history of the world when the heroes of romance were ruling at once,-imperial Charlemagne in the West and capricious Harun al Rashid in the East, and we can scarcely turn the pages on which the record of the times are written without expecting to see a paladin of the one start up before us, or to have our ears ravished by the seductive voice of Queen Scheherazade telling her romantic tales. The familiar picture of the period is crowded with jinns, efreets, and ghouls; minarets burnished with gold shine from every quarter; gayly-lighted pleasure barges float on the waters of the Tigris; deadly scimetars flash before our startled eyes; we are introduced to caves in which thieves gorged with gold have hoarded their ill-gotten wealth; we tread the streets of Bagdad by night in company with kalifs true and false; we hear the sound of a voice calling upon us to exchange old lamps for new; we enter the gorgeous palace of the four-and-twenty windows, and as we behold the unfinished one, exclaim with the poet :

THE BAGDAD OF STORY.

The nfinished window in Aladdin's tower
Un nished must remain. . . .

"So I wander and wander along,
And forever before me gleams

The shining city of songs

In the beautiful land of dreams."

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It is a land of dreams to most of the world, but it was far otherwise to the citizens of Bagdad then. To them Harun was a flesh-and-blood monarch; his scimetar was no fantasm of a dream; his caprices were not the entertaining story of a fascinating Persian genius; the brilliant Oriental imagination had not yet wrought out its rich pages of adventure and despotic marvels; the people of Bagdad did not smile at the erratic deeds of their chief ruler: to them he was one whose words made every subject. tremble, lest the fate of the Barmecides, perchance, might be theirs; lest the whirling scimetar of the executioner should cut through their own necks. The people who in that day were born "adown the Tigris,"

"By Bagdad's shrines of fretted gold,

High-walled gardens green and old,"

who rested beneath the citron shadows, who saw

"The costly doors flung open wide,

Cold glittering through the lamplight dim,

And broidered sofas on each side,"

did not enjoy the charms of the scenes they were surrounded by so much as we may now; for every step they took was dogged by fear-fear that was based upon ghastly experience of the tyranny and

peremptory savagery of the "good Harun al Rashid, of which poetry so gayly speaks to us today.

The reign of this monarch, who raised the greatness of the kalifate higher than it has ever before. been carried, was divided into two periods, during the first of which the sovereign, giving himself up to the enjoyment of luxurious ease, permitted his ministers, the sons of Barmek, to send his armies hither and thither in search of conquests or in efforts to put down risings against his power. This period. closed in 803, and the affairs of the kalif then fell into a state of confusion which only grew worse after his death in 809.

The Barmecides were patrons of art, letters, and science, and encouraged men of learning to make their homes at the capital; Harun sympathized in this policy, and Bagdad became magnificent almost beyond the power of words to express to readers accustomed to the comparative simplicity of nineteenthcentury magnificence. In the progress of Bagdad the kalif's brother Ibrahim, a man of parts, who afterwards became a claimant for supreme power, was a helper not to be left out of the account. The chief vizier, who bore the burdens of state, as the title signifies, was Yahya, son of Kalid, son of Barmek; and he it was who encouraged trade, regulated the internal administration of government in every respect, fortified the frontiers, and made the provinces prosperous by making them safe. Jaafer, his son, governed Syria and Egypt, besides having other responsibilities. The family was an ornament to the