uld scarcely dispense with the assistance
of his imagination, when attempting to describe private life among the
civilized nations of the sixth century before Christ. He would however
escape all danger of those anachronisms to which the author of such a
work as I have undertaken must be hopelessly liable. With attention and
industry, errors of an external character may be avoided, but if I had
chosen to hold myself free from all consideration of the times in which
I and my readers have come into the world, and the modes of thought at
present existing among us, and had attempted to depict nothing but the
purely ancient characteristics of the men and their times, I should have
become unintelligible to many of my readers, uninteresting to all, and
have entirely failed in my original object. My characters will therefore
look like Persians, Egyptians, &c., but in their language, even more
than in their actions, the German narrator will be perceptible, not
always superior to the sentimentality of his day, but a native of the
world in the nineteenth century after the appearance of that heavenly
Master, whose teaching left so deep an impression on human thought and
feeling.

The Persians and Greeks, being by descent related to ourselves,
present fewer difficulties in this respect than the Egyptians, whose
dwelling-place on the fruitful islands won by the Nile from the Desert,
completely isolated them from the rest of the world.

To Professor Lepsius, who suggested to me that a tale confined entirely
to Egypt and the Egyptians might become wearisome, I owe many thanks;
and following his hint, have so arranged the materials supplied by
Herodotus as to introduce my reader first into a Greek circle. Here he
will feel in a measure at home, and indeed will entirely sympathize with
them on one important point, viz.: in their ideas on the Beautiful and
on Art. Through this Hellenic portico he reaches Egypt, from thence
passes on to Persia and returns finally to the Nile. It has been my
desire that the three nations should attract him equally, and I have
therefore not centred the entire interest of the plot in one hero, but
have endeavored to exhibit each nation in its individual character, by
means of a fitting representative. The Egyptian Princess has given
her name to the book, only because the weal and woe of all my other
characters were decided by her fate, and she must therefore be regarded
as the central point of the whole.

I