Dr. Johnson thus sums up his notice of 'The Tempest':--"Whatever might have been the intention of their author, these tales are made instrumental to the production of many characters, diversified with boundless invention, and preserved with profound skill in nature, extensive knowledge of opinions, and accurate observation of life. Here are exhibited princes, courtiers, and sailors, all speaking in their real characters. There is the agency of airy spirits and of earthy goblins, the operations of magic, the tumults of a storm, the adventures on a desert island, the native effusion of untaught affection, the punishment of guilt, and the final happiness of those for whom our passions and reason are equally interested." We can fairly say this much and far more for our Tales. Viewed as a _tout ensemble_ in full and complete form, they are a drama of Eastern life, and a Dance of Death made sublime by faith and the highest emotions, by the certainty of expiation and the fullness of atoning equity, where virtue is victorious, vice is vanquished, and the ways of Allah are justified to man. They are a panorama which remains ken-speckle upon the mental retina. They form a phantasmagoria in which archangels and angels, devils and goblins, men of air, of fire, of water, naturally mingle with men of earth; where flying horses and talking fishes are utterly realistic; where King and Prince meet fisherman and pauper, lamia and cannibal; where citizen jostles Badawi, eunuch meets knight; the Kazi hob-nobs with the thief; the pure and pious sit down to the same tray with the pander and the procuress; where the professional religionist, the learned Koranist, and the strictest moralist consort with the wicked magician, the scoffer, and the debauchee-poet like Abu Nowas; where the courtier jests with the boor, and where the sweep is bedded with the noble lady. And the characters are "finished and quickened by a few touches swift and sure as the glance of sunbeams." The whole is a kaleidoscope where everything falls into picture; gorgeous palaces and pavilions; grisly underground caves and deadly wolds; gardens fairer than those of the Hesperid; seas dashing with clashing billows upon enchanted mountains; valleys of the Shadow of Death; air-voyages and promenades in the abysses of ocean; the duello, the battle, and the siege; the wooing of maidens and the marriage-rite. All the splendor and squalor, the beauty and baseness, the glamor and grotesqueness, the magic and the mournfulness, the bravery and baseness of Oriental life are here: its pictures of the three great Arab passions--love, war, and fancy--entitle it to be called 'Blood, Musk, and Hashish.' And still more, the genius of the story-teller quickens the dry bones of history, and by adding Fiction to Fact revives the dead past; the Caliphs and the Caliphate return to Baghdad and Cairo, whilst Asmodeus kindly removes the terrace-roof of every tenement and allows our curious glances to take in the whole