"I read that once in Affrica
A princely wight did raine,
Who had to name Kophetua,
As poets they did faine."

The outburst of political speculation which followed the Renaissance is well known to us by its remarkable literature. True it is that the greater part of it is long since dead and sleeps in peace, save where every now and then its ghosts are scared by a literary historian. But this obscurity only adds to its interest, and increases at once the charm, the safety, and the credit we may enjoy in discussing it. For the ordinary Englishman perhaps the only work of the class which is still really alive is the delightful political romance of Sir Thomas More. Yet to those who love the dustier shelves of libraries long ranks of its comrades will be not unfamiliar, standing guard as it were over the memory of an intellectual movement as vigorous and creative as any the world has seen.

It is to the more daring and fantastic of these works that this chapter in the history of philosophy owes its charm and freshness.[Pg 2] So entrancing indeed are they that those double traitors to humanity, who not only write books, but write books about books, have led us to look upon these ponderous folios as the only mark the movement has left on history, and we are apt to forget that it also had its practical side. Yet that side not only had an existence, but it was even more romantic and fanciful than the other.

For many of the pregnant seeds from the tree of political knowledge, which the strong breath of the Renaissance was wafting over Europe, fell on good ground, where pedantry did not spring up and choke them. There were many cultivated earnest gentlemen of that time in whose chivalrous hearts they alighted, and whose imagination was so stirred with the new ideas, that they actually attempted to carry them into practice.

Coming as the movement did contemporaneously with the dayspring of colonial enterprise, it naturally suggested itself to these high-souled scholars to leave the corruption and oppression of the old countries which it was hopeless to reform, and sailing away with a little community of kindred souls in whom the new spirit breathed, to found in some distant land a colony, where a polity established in pure reason should grow to be a model to the world.

Many of these attempts were complete failures at once, nearly all were more or less[Pg 3] short-lived, and by the end of the last century there was not one so prosperous as the African colony of Oneiria.

Lying as it did in that remote and little-known corner of the world which is watered by the Draa and its tributaries, and is intersected by the spurs of the Anti-Atlas, it had been able to enjoy after its first struggle for existence the repose of a well-earned obscurity. There was no one who envied it anything, and consequently it had no enemy, nor even an importunate friend to seek its alliance and lead it into scrapes. The half savage Shelluhs, who sparsely occupied the country, were soon content to remain as tributaries under their own chiefs, in the more inaccessible parts of the mountains, and to leave the teeming valleys and table-lands to the newcomers.

Through the Canary Islands the colony kept up a small but regular trade with Western Europe. The exports were of a very mixed nature, but chiefly consisted of dates. As the country was practically self-supporting, the imports were comparatively simple. They were confined to books, works of art, and clothes of the latest mode.

For it was the pride of Oneiria, as with most other colonies of the time, that, notwithstanding its remote position, it floated on the surface of European opinion; and so freely did it indulge in this delicious conviction, that it is to be feared it grew but[Pg 4] too often to an actual intemperance, and at the time of which I speak there is no doubt that Oneiria sometimes caricatured the fantasies of a fantastic age.

Internally Oneiria was almost as unruffled as in its foreign relations. The elaborate constitution of the original founder worked so smoothly and effectively that crime and even discontent seemed almost unknown. The most ingenious and conscientious politicians had long ago abandoned the hopeless struggle to extract a difference of opinion out of questions of the interior. This dearth of disagreement led to a serious famine in the political world, that had it not been for one recurrent topic, of which I shall have to speak more fully hereafter, politics must have completely perished of starvation.

It is not clear who the founder of the fortunate colony was. From an exaggerated niceness of honour, so characteristic of the age we call Elizabethan, he seems to have taken most ingenious precautions that his very name should be forgotten, lest it might appear that his experiment was a device to feed his personal vanity rather than the disinterested sacrifice it really was.

That he was an Englishman, who had considerably modified his national characteristics by extensive and sagacious travel, is almost certain. His followers were believed to have been recruited from amongst the hardy seafaring population of the coasts of[Pg 5] Bohemia, though more recent conjecture points to the fact that London was the real parent of the colony, and it is suggested that by "Bohemia" the "Alsatia" of Whitefriars is really intended. However, as the whole of the evidence on the subject is contained in the following pages, it will be an advantage to allow the reader to judge for himself upon the whole case, and so avoid a tedious and possibly unfruitful discussion.

The fact in the early history of the colony most interesting for us is fortunately beyond dispute. Oneiria was, without a shadow of doubt, founded on the ruins of the kingdom of that Kophetua whose romantic love-story, probably a good deal perverted, is so familiar to us from the beautiful ballads of the "King and the Beggar-Maid." It was this which must have suggested to the founder his first steps towards oblivion when he ascended his new throne under the style of Kophetua II.

Were this fact not established from other sources, beyond all question there is ample evidence in the present story to support it. The ancient kingdom must have been dying, and not dead, at the time. We shall meet with constant traces of an older, ruder, and more Oriental civilisation underlying the scientific superstructure of the English knight.

The results were extremely curious, but perhaps the most interesting phenomenon[Pg 6] to which this peculiar fact gave rise, was the extraordinary organisation and privileges of the beggar class, though it is possible that some of their wilder laws and customs were a direct importation from "Whitefriars."

It is a pity that no more is known on these points, but further inquiry is almost hopeless. The colony was entirely destroyed soon after the happy reign of Kophetua XIII. and his beloved Queen came peacefully to an end. There was but a day between their deaths, and so prostrated were the people by the sudden loss of both their idolised sovereigns, that they seem to have been able to offer no adequate resistance to a Jehad which, for some unknown cause, was preached against them amongst the neighbouring Mussulman tribes. It is probable that they had made some attempts to intervene for the protection of the last of the Berber Christians. A few of these highly interesting survivals are believed to have been still in existence at the end of the last century, in the remoter parts of the Atlas, and some may possibly have continued even later.

All, however, which we know for certain is that in one of those strange restless upheavals, so characteristic of the north of Africa, the Mussulman Berbers rose and flowed like a flood over what was once Oneiria. As suddenly as the colony had appeared, it disappeared from history; the country is now impenetrable to Europeans,[Pg 7] and has not been visited since the destruction of the colony. Rohlfs, indeed, tells us that somewhere in the basin of the Draa he saw amongst the distant hills what looked like the nave and tower of a church, and he further noticed that in this region the people had a much higher style of architecture, and otherwise seemed distinctly more civilised, than the tribes he was already familiar with. But no other traces of the colony have been met with, and its destruction must have been as complete as it was sudden.

Beyond what has already been related, all that is known or likely to be known of Oneiria is contained in the following pages, which deal with a romantic episode in the life of King Kophetua XIII. We must congratulate ourselves that even so much was preserved by the taste of a gentleman who visited the colony at the beginning of this century, and brought back with him the notes from which the present romance is taken. For romance it certainly is, and there seems no reason why we should deprive it of that title simply because it is also a record of historical occurrences.