to aid the
designs of the monarch and to add to the festivities of his court.

Yet motives of policy may have combined with the designs of pleasure. In
all ages the despot has sought to blind and dazzle the people by a
display of power and magnificence; and the princes and nobles around,
from distant provinces, have swelled the retinue of their attendants.

The amusements of monarchs and of courts have, through all varieties of
manners and degrees of refinement, been much the same. The ancient
Syrian or Persian, like the modern British or French monarch, had his
royal parks and forests for hunting.

All nations have patronized the various trials of skill and strength,
and the mimic fight has ever been an amusement where war was the great
business of life. And the royal pageantry was doubtless intermingled
with the religious ceremonies which allowed a license to criminal
indulgence and at the same time offered a supposed expiation for crime.

While these employed the day, the games of chance, the wine, the music,
the movements of the degraded dancing-girl, and the tricks of the
buffoon and the jester, amused the late hours and varied the festive
scenes of the night.

The feast was drawing to a close, and, at the termination of this long
season of hilarity, Ahasuerus extended the pleasures of the occasion to
all classes of his subjects at Shushan.

He threw open his palaces and pleasure-grounds, his parks and
gardens--always of vast extent around eastern palaces--and admitted all
the citizens to a feast prepared for them. Tents had been erected within
the precincts of the palace for the tables--and these tents were
furnished with all the luxurious appendages of the east--with white and
green and blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to
silver rings and marble pillars; while the beds--the couches around the
tables, against which the ancients reclined--were of gold and silver,
upon a pavement of red and blue, and black and white marble; while they
gave them to drink in vessels of gold. Until these last days the princes
and nobles alone had participated in the festive scenes; but now, as we
have said, all ranks were allowed to share, and the citizens of Shushan,
subjects of Ahasuerus, thronged the palace and trod the royal gardens,
and, entering the tents, enjoyed all that royalty could offer in ancient
Persia--far surpassing in costly splendour and elegance the
entertainments of modern courts. A