zar's reign.
"For four years the seat of my kingdom did not rejoice my heart. In
all my dominions I built no high place of power, nor did I lay up the
precious treasure of my kingdom. In Babylon I erected no buildings for
myself nor for the glory of my empire. In the worship of Bel-Merodach,
my Lord, the joy of my heart, in Babylon the city of his worship and
the seat of my empire, I did not sing his praise, nor did I furnish
his altar with victims"--and then, as if returning to the thing that
lay nearest him--"In four years I did not dig out the canals."

[Illustration: "And he was driven from men, and did eat grass as
oxen."]

In time, the black cloud of the king's madness passed away and health
and reason were restored to him. And if the words that Daniel puts
into the king's mouth on his recovery are really his, we must
recognize in this Eastern Despot a decided strain of religious
sensibility, a trait that appears beside in his almost passionate
expressions of affection for his god Merodach, and in his sympathy
with Daniel and the youths who were his companions, in their own
religious devotion. Although Daniel and the other youths whom the king
had caused to be called out from the mass of the Jewish captives for
his own particular service--boys distinguished from the rest by their
personal beauty, their intelligence and aptitude--were too earnest in
their religious convictions and too high-spirited to conform to the
Babylonian religion or to conceal their sentiments under the cloak of
policy, yet the king tolerated their adherence to their ritual and
yielded only in part to the persistence of the Jew-baiters, who saw
with angry eyes the promotion of the hated captives to places of power
and authority over the heads of their captors. In spite of his enemies
Daniel was allowed to exercise his own religion in peace; and the
persecutors of his companions, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, were
themselves destroyed in the furnace they had heated for their innocent
victims, which the youths themselves were rescued from by the personal
interposition of the king, who pretended to see--or in his religious
exaltation did really see--the god himself standing guard over the
victims in the midst of the flames.

Of Nebuchadnezzar after the recovery of his reason we learn but
little. The chronicle of Daniel passes abruptly from Nebuchadnezzar to
Belshazzar, and the great king is not mentioned again. History, too,
is silent. It