The characters are of very different degrees of merit.  Theagenes is as insipid and uninteresting as one of Walter Scott’s well-behaved heroes; and his entreaties to Chariclea, in the final scene, no longer to delay making herself known to her parents, betray a most laudable instinct of self-preservation.  The deeds of strength and valour which he is occasionally made to perform, seem rather to arise from the author’s remembering that his hero must do something to support the character, than to result naturally from the situations in which he is placed, and his love of decorum is carried, on all occasions, to an absurd extent of prudery.  “Le heros de la piece est d’une sagesse qui a donne lieu a des railleries assez plaisantes,” says Bayle; though the instance usually cited—­a box on the ear, which he gives Chariclea, when she approaches him in her beggar’s dress, under the walls of Memphis, and attempts to throw herself into his arms, is scarcely a fair one, as he does not at the time recognize his beloved under her unbecoming disguise.  The character of Chariclea herself, however, makes ample amends for the defects of that of her lover; and this superiority of the heroine, it may be observed, is almost invariable in the early Greek romances.  The masculine firmness and presence of mind which she evinces in situations of peril and difficulty, combined at all times with feminine delicacy, and the warmth and confiding simplicity of her love for Theagenes, attach to her a degree of interest which belongs to none of the other personages; and her spontaneous burst of grateful affection, on recognizing, at Meroe, the voice of her foster-father, Charicles, is expressed with exquisite tenderness.  Of the subordinate characters little need be said.  Charicles is a mere impersonation of benevolence and parental love; and Cnemon seems to have been introduced for little else than to tell his own long story, and listen to that of Calasiris in return.  The old Egyptian priest, however, is a sketch of considerable merit.  Like Scott’s Peregrine Touchwood, though abundantly zealous at all times to serve his friends, he cannot find it in his heart to take any but the most round-about way of doing so; but he is never disconcerted by any of the untoward results of his schemes, and relates to Cnemon, with the most perfect self-complacency, the deceit which he had practiced on his confiding host, Charicles, in helping Theagenes to steal away his adopted daughter, and the various scrapes into which his proteges had fallen under his guidance.  He has, moreover, pet theories of his own on the phenomena of the Nile, the cause of the roughness of the Ionian Sea, and various other matters, in which he indoctrinates Cnemon par parenthese:  he is an enthusiastic admirer and constant quoter of Homer, whose Egyptian birth (at Thebes the hundred-gated) he maintains with all the zeal of a Highlander defending the authenticity of Ossian; and, on the whole, we cannot but think the author has scarcely used him well, in not allowing him to live to see his efforts crowned with success, and to enjoy the honours which would doubtless have been heaped upon him at the court of Ethiopia.