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with his titled harlots.[1] In reality, he appears to have been a morose and fantastic despot, pursued, like Philip II. of Spain, by the spectres of his own crimes, tormented at once by superstitious remorse and jealous suspicion, which, while oppressing his waking hours and troubling his natural rest with the tortures of gloomy and foreboding thought, again and again impelled him to commit anew the misdeeds whose recollection embittered his existence and to deprive himself, at their malignant instance, of the only men about him on whom he could reckon for fidelity and ability combined. His fits of gloomy depression and his chronic restlessness by night and day are constantly referred to in “The Thousand and One Nights,” and it was in endeavouring to shake off these haunting miseries that he seems to have met with the many adventures that are recorded of him and of which a considerable portion may fairly be supposed to have been invented and arranged for him by the distinguished poets who were his constant associates.
- ↑ Er Reshid’s apologists claim for him that he was generous and a patron of art (claims of which my readers are qualified to judge, without further remark on my part) and that his (alleged) intercourse with Charlemagne proves him to have been superior in enlightenment to his contemporaries of the Muslim world. The legend of the diplomatic rapprochement between the two monarchs is of exceedingly doubtful authenticity; but, supposing it to be in every respect founded upon fact, it is evident to a student of Muslim history that Haroun’s overtures to the Western Emperor were dictated by no motives of policy more enlightened than the desire to embarrass his hated enemy Nicephorus, Emperor of Constantinople, against whom he seems to have cherished a peculiar spite.
