who is only partially insincere, and not altogether ill-intentioned.  Djabal is an impostor almost wholly for the sake of others.  He is a patriotic Druse, the son of the last Emir, supposed to have perished in the massacre of the Sheikhs, but preserved when a child and educated in Europe.  His sole aim is to free his nation from its bondage, and lead it back to Lebanon.  But in order to strengthen the people’s trust in him, and to lead them back in greater glory, he pretends that he is “Hakeem,” their divine, predestined deliverer.  The delusion grows upon himself; he succeeds triumphantly, but in the very moment of triumph he loses faith in himself, the imposture is all but discovered, and he dies, a victim of what was wrong in him, while the salt of his noble and successful purpose keeps alive his memory among his people.  In striking contrast with Djabal stands Loys, the frank, bright, young Breton knight, with his quick, generous heart, his chivalrous straightforwardness of thought and action, his earnest pity for the oppressed Druses, and his passionate love for the Druse maiden Anael.  Anael herself is one of the most “actual yet uncommon” of the poet’s women.  She is a true daughter of the East, to the finest fibre of her being.  Her tender and fiery soul burns upward through error and crime with a leaping, quenchless flame.  She loves Djabal, believing him to be “Hakeem” and divine, with a love which seems to her too human, too much the love evoked by a mere man’s nature.  Her attempt at adoration only makes him feel more keenly the fact of his imposture.  Misunderstanding his agitation and the broken words he lets drop, she fancies he despises her, and feels impelled to do some great deed, and so exalt herself to be worthy of him.  Fired with enthusiasm, she anticipates his crowning act, the act of liberation, and herself slays the tyrannical Prefect.  The magnificent scene in which this occurs is the finest in the play, and there is a singularly impressive touch of poetry and stagecraft in a certain line of it, where Djabal and Anael meet, at the moment when she has done the deed which he is waiting to do.  Unconscious of what she has done, he tells her to go:—­

                      “I slay him here,
      And here you ruin all.  Why speak you not? 
      Anael, the Prefect comes!” [ANAEL screams.]

There is drama in this stage direction.  With this involuntary scream (and the shudder and start aside one imagines, to see if the dead man really is coming) a great actress might thrill an audience.  Djabal, horror-stricken at what she has done, confesses to her that he is no Hakeem, but a mere man.  After the first revulsion of feeling, her love, hitherto questioned and hampered by her would-be adoration, burst forth with a fuller flood.  But she expects him to confess to the tribe.  Djabal refuses:  he will carry through his scheme to the end.  In the first flush of her indignation at his unworthiness,