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This Mokanna is an Impostor, who works upon the enthusiasm of his followers by the assumption of a divine character—and whose ostensible object is the destruction of all false religions, and every kind of tyranny and despotism. When these glorious objects are attained, he is then to throw aside his Silver Veil, and admit the ennobled souls of men to gaze upon his refulgent visage. In reality, however, he is a Being of a fiendish and demoniac nature, hating God and man, and burning for power and empire, that he may trample upon human nature with derision, mockery, and outrage, and thus insult and blaspheme the Eternal. The dominion which he exercises over his superstitious proselytes—the successful progress of his career—his lofty, wild, and mysterious doctrines—the splendour of his kingly state—the gorgeous magnificence of his array—the rich moresque-work of his Haram—and the beauties from a hundred realms which it encloses—are all described with great power and effect, though not unfrequently with no little extravagance and exaggeration. In his Haram is Zelica, the heroine of the poem, whom the supposed death of her lover Azim has driven into a kind of insanity. Mokanna so works upon the phrenzied enthusiasm of her disordered mind, as to convince her, that before she can enter into heaven, she must renounce her oaths of fidelity to Azim, and bind herself for ever on the earth to him, the Impostor. He conducts her into a charnel-vault, and there, surrounded with the ghastly dead, she takes the fatal oath, and seals it by a draught of human blood. Meanwhile, Azim returns from foreign war, and joins the banners of the Impostor. He then discovers the wicked arts of Mokanna, and the ruin of Zelica abandons the Silver Veil joins the army of the Caliph, and routs the Prophet-chief in various battles, till he forces him and his remaining infatuated followers to shut themselves up in a fortress. Mokanna, finding farther resistance in vain, poisons all his troops—and after venting his rage, hatred, and contempt on Zelica, leaps into a cistern of such potent poison, that his body is dissolved in a moment. Zelica covers herself with the Silver Veil, and Azim, leading the storming party, mistakes her for Mokanna, and kills her.

We could present our readers with many passages of tenderness and beauty from this singular poem; but as we shall have occasion to quote some stanzas of that character from "Paradise and the Peri," we shall confine ourselves to two extracts, in which Mr Moore has successfully attempted a kind of composition new to him; the one describing the armament of the Caliph as he marched against the Impostor, and the other, the last fatal feast, at which Mokanna poisons the adherents of his fallen fortunes.