ceding day, with a large body of troops, to secure the possession of the districts of Galilee, Samaria, and all Judea to the southward, in order to make himself master of the vacant pashalik of Damascus. As it was known that Suliman would make his first halt at Jerusalem, the English consul recommended that the Travellers should set out for that place, where they might hope to obtain from his hand the only protection under which it would now be safe to travel.

Acre, the Accho of the Scriptures, (by which name it is now usually called by the natives,) has again risen to some importance, having been considerably strengthened and improved by the late Jezzar Pasha. In Maundrell's time, it had not recovered from its last fatal siege by the Saracens, by whom it was laid utterly waste with the exception of a large khan, a mosque, and a few poor cottages, it presented at that time a vast and spacious ruin. The khan still remains, and is the only building which can be attributed to the Saracen age, although Saracenic remains may occasionally be traced in the inner walls of the town, The Christian ruins are altogether gone; those which are mentioned by Maundrell as existing in his time, having all disappeared. Even the three Gothic arches mentioned by Dr. Clarke, and called by the English sailors, King Richard's 'palace,' have been razed to the ground. Shafts of red and grey granite and marble pillars are seen throughout the town, some used as thresholds to door-ways, others as supporters of piazzas, besides several slabs of fine marble, which Mr. Buckingham considers as the remains of the ancient Ptolemais. At the north end of the town, he observed a fine Corinthian capital in perfect preservation, lying at the door of a new mosque, and the fragment of another, of the composite order, the diameter of which was upwards of five feet. Remains of still higher antiquity, however, are to be traced in the ditch of the newly erected outer walls, on the south-east.

In sinking the ditch to the depth of twenty feet below the level of the present soil, the foundations of buildings were exposed to view, apparently of private dwellings of the humblest order, as they were not more than from ten to twelve feet square, with small door-ways and passages leading from one to the other. The materials of which they were constructed, are a highly burnt brick, with a mixture of cement and sand, as well as small portions of stone in some parts, the whole so firmly bound together by age and the strongly adhesive power of the cement used, as to form one solid mass. As the walls were of some thickness, though the apartments they enclosed were small, they offered an excellent material for building; and portions of it had been used in the foundations of the outer walls of the fort, in the same way as fragments of the old Greek city have been applied to the building of the fortifications before the modern Alexandria.'

Mr. Buckingham will be thought to assign to these remains a tolerably early antiquity, when he speaks of them as, perhaps, traces of the Canaanitish Accho. They are more probably of Roman origin. The small dimensions of the apartments, correspond with the account given us by Sir W. Gell, of the size of the rooms in the houses of the Pompeians.

Sepphoury, (Sipuria, anciently Tsiphori,) termed by Josephus the capital of Galilee, is now an inconsiderable village, all the inhabitants of which are Mahommedans. It lay a little on the Traveller's left, behind a rising ground, in his way to Nazareth. The ruins of the house of St. Anna having been entirely de-" molished, the village is no longer honoured with the visits of the Christian priests. Nazareth (now Nassara) is styled by our Author a respectable village,' containing about two hundred wellbuilt dwellings, and a handsome little mosque. It is described as lying in a deep valley, on the southern side of a steep hill, but nearer its base than its summit, and overhung with the rocky eminence, from which our Author supposes that the Jews threatened to cast our Lord. Dr. Clarke describes a precipice above the Maronite church,' as, probably, the precise spot alluded to by Luke.

The valley in which it stands is round and concave, as Maundrell has described it, and is itself the hollow of a high range of hills; but I could perceive no long and narrow valley opening to the east, as mentioned by Dr. Clarke; nor does it indeed exist; the whole valley being shut in by steep and rugged hills on all sides. The Quarterly Reviewers were led by this misrepresentation to accuse D'Anville of having erroneously given it a different termination, and placed the city to the south-west of the hills which separate Galilee from the plains of Esdraelon. The fact is, that no such long and narrow valley is apparent in any direction, and that Nassara stands in the hollow of a cluster of hills; the north-western of which separate it from the plain of Zabulon, and the south-western, from the plain of Esdraelon; while on the north-east are the lands of Galilee, and on the south-west those of Samaria.' p. 93.

What is absurdly termed by the priests, the Mountain of the Precipitation,' is nearly two miles from the synagogue which they still shew as the one in which our Lord taught, and is almost inaccessible from the steep and rocky nature of the road. It is a precipice about thirty feet in height, on the brink of which are set up two large flat stones, edge-ways, on which are shewn several round marks like the deep imprint of fingers on wax,' which are insisted on as the marks of Christ's grasp when he clung to the stone.' This bungling and senseless legend affords the Traveller a correct sample of what he has to expect in the shape of traditional information, on his arrival at the Holy City. Mr. Buckingham, however, while he treats this tradition with proper ridicule, takes upon himself to rebuke Dr.

Clarke for terming the equally insane reveries with regard to the other sacred places, mummery, a total disbelief of which seems best suited to the feelings of Protestants.' The" Or'thodox Traveller," as he is called,' Mr. B. sneeringly says, 'is 'almost angry with the poor friars of Nazareth for endeavouring to make others believe what they are themselves firmly ' persuaded of.' In our strictures on the religion of others,' he adds, the advice of our Saviour himself is worth consulting, Matt. vii. 5, if we would wish to avoid the imputation 'thrown on those whom he so deservedly reproves.' To us this rebuke appears as unjust and uncalled for as it is uncourteous ; and it betrays a feeling of pique, or rivalry, or unfriendly sentiment of some kind towards Dr. Clarke, which we regret to notice. Mr. Buckingham seems particularly eager to invalidate, when he can, the correctness of the Dr.'s statements; sometimes, as in the above cited paragraph, meeting them with a flat contradiction, and at other times indulging in sarcastic comments on his representations. All this is very disgusting. Dr. Clarke may have committed some mistakes, through haste or an excited imagination, or through rash deductions from partial facts, or deceptions of memory; but his authority and his merits as one of the most enlightened, indefatigable, and accomplished of modern travellers, are too well established to render a contemptuous tone of reference either proper or politic.

That the excavated dwelling which is shewn as the residence of Joseph and Mary, was really theirs, is, says Mr. Buckingham, ' quite as probable' as that it should have been the dwelling of any other family. Granted. That is to say, there is a chance, which a good mathematician might calculate, that it was theirs. To this chance, Tradition can add nothing of the least weight as evidence, since this same Tradition, by our Author's own shewing in the instance of the Mountain of Precipitation, is proved to be an incurable dotard; absolutely nothing, unless it be the further chance, that out of a thousand falsehoods from the lips of the same notorious liar, one story may be true. Whether the friars themselves believe what they so confidently assert, is nothing to the purpose. In a Protestant, it must be a state of mind only a shade removed from total disbelief, which we should deem warranted by the degree of probability arising from this compound chance of the thing's being true.

On the top of Mount Tabor, amid a mass of ruins, are shewn three grottoes, said to be remains of the three tabernacles 'proposed to be erected by St. Peter, at the moment of the Transfiguration.' We know not whether we are to charge this bull to the account of the Nazareen guide, or that of our Author. No particular history is assigned to any of the other remains; it is probable, therefore, that they are of remote antiquity.

Mount Tabor appears to have been used in the earliest ages as a military post, and to have been strongly fortified. The Author suggests this illustration of the references to it in the fourth chapter of the Book of Judges. It resisted for some time the Roman army under Vespasian. A large portion of wall still remains entire on the south side of the plain on its summit, having its foundations on the solid rock. Among the fragments of stone, the Author noticed several blocks with Arabic inscriptions in good relief, but none of them were sufficiently long to be intelligible. He confirms Maundrell's testimony as to the measurement of the area on the top of the mount, who describes it as an oval of about two furlongs in length and one in breadth; but the bearings of the surrounding objects are, in that Traveller's account, erroneously stated. Mr. Buckingham's observations were, he says, taken by a compass, and noted on the spot. Maundrell's error, which, if it be an error, is chargeable on Pococke also and other travellers, he supposes to have been occasioned by some falsely assumed position of the sun in the heavens at the time of observation, as the errors are, he says, relatively consistent.

Thus, Deborah, which is written westward, should be northward; Hermon which is written eastward,* should be southward; and the mountain of Gilboa, which is written southward, should be eastward. The plate which accompanies the octavo edition of his journey (1810), is altogether so unlike the scene it is intended to represent, that I am sure it could not have been taken on the spot, nor drawn even from memory. In the first place, Nain and Endor are not distinguishable from hence, though their sites are pointed out. The supposed Hermon is a range of hills running for several miles nearly east and west, and forming the southern boundary of the plain of Esdraelon. The mountains of Gilboa are a distant range crossing those of Hermon almost at right angles, and running nearly north and south; but not approaching near to the latter, since they are east of Jordan. The mountains of Samaria are on the west of all these, and nearer to the sea. The river Kishon has its springs near to the foot of Tabor, and winds considerably in its course. And the plain of Esdraelon, besides being of four or five times the extent there given by the perspective, is not bounded by steep cliffs rising thus abruptly from their base, but by a range of smooth and sloping hills. Lastly, the Mount of Tabor, instead of the slender and towering pyramid there represented, is a rounded hill of the elevation of about one thousand feet, and of a semiglobular shape, being longer at the base in every direction than it is high, and having its outline smooth and every part of a rounded form, since from below nothing is seen of the small level space on its summit. It is the last to the eastward of a range of four

* Mr. Jolliffe also describes mount Hermon as to the east of Tabor.

Rev.

hills of a similar kind, all less conspicuous than itself, and all having distinct passes between them, but neither of them so completely isolated as this of Tabor.

While analyzing this, the same observations may be repeated on the plate of Acre and Mount Carmel, which is, if possible, still wider from the truth, while that of the cisterns of Solomon at Ras-el-Ayn, examined, like the rest, upon the spot, appeared to me so totally unlike the thing that it was intended to represent, that I forebore even to make a remark on it, and closed the book with a persuasion, that so accurate an observer as Maundrell could never even have seen those drawings, much less have approved of their being attached to his Travels. The fact, perhaps, is, that some well-meaning friend, or some interested booksellers, subsequently caused these drawings to be composed from the printed descriptions and charts of the places they profess to represent, and thus embellished, as they thought, while they really disgraced the book. This is the more probable, as no name is given either of the painter or engraver. Such a practice, however, cannot be too severely reprehended, as these plates not only give false impressions, which are worse than none at all, but do injustice to the memory of the worthy man and excellent traveller for whose productions they are tacitly made to pass.' pp. 109, 10.

The plates in question could never have been intended to pass for representations of the objects described, but rather for plans: they are, however, vile and unmeaning. It is not quite correct, that the alleged errors are relatively consistent; since the erroneous observation which should make the northward be mistaken for westward, and the southward for eastward, would bring the southward into the westward. In making the river Kishon rise at the foot of Tabor, Mr. B. differs from former travellers, who place its springs on the S.E. of Carmel. That Mount Tabor was not the scene of the Transfiguration, even Reland is forced to conclude. Maundrell expresses strong doubts on the subject; and Mr. Jolliffe has pointed out geographical objections to the

tradition.

Mount Carmel is described as a range of hills extending six or eight miles nearly north and south, coming from the plain of Esdraelon, and ending in the promontory which forms the Bay of Acre; having on the east, a fine plain watered by the river Kishon, and on the west, a narrower plain descending to the sea. Its greatest height does not exceed fifteen hundred feet. Carmel was apparently the name, not of the hill only, distinguished as Mount Carmel, on the top of which Elijah sacrificed, but of the whole district, which afforded the richest pasture. This was "the excellency of Carmel" which Isaiah opposes to the barren desert. It is spoken of by Amos as "the habitations "of the shepherds," and by Micah as a pastoral solitude encompassed with wood. "The forest of his Carmel," if correctly rendered, would also convey the idea that it abounded at