reth. This simple fact provokes the following gratuitous information:

It seems to have been peculiar to the NAZARITES to suffer their hair to grow long, and to abstain from the use of wine, on making a sacred vow: and the story of Delilah, and Samson, who was a NAZARITE, is familiar to all.'

Nazarite, this critical inquirer takes for granted, must mean a native of Nazareth! but there is yet no danger of his reader being deceived, since he makes, as usual, his appeal to a testimony that contradicts him: for all to whom the story of Samson is familiar, well know that he was of Zorah, and had no connection whatever with Nazareth; and that consequently a Nazarite is not a Nazarean. This mode of producing evidence against himself really spares us so much trouble, that we cannot feel too grateful for it.

His field of compilation is not, however, confined to the writers of antiquity as the storm drives at any door he knocks.' Nearly six pages (367-373.) are allotted to a paper by an anonymous author in the Gentleman's Magazine;' and we know not whether we owe it to the ignorance of Mr. Urban's ingenious correspondent, or to his own,' or to both, that he writes Arena,' for Podium, in his details of a theatre; and Pircum more than once for the Piraus of Athens.

We shall not be accused of bestowing an undue share of attention on the examination of the nature of Mr. Buckingham's citations, when we inform the reader that they occupy the full half of the volume. The day, however, is happily gone by when such a mode of book-making could pass upon the world for learning. Pedantry is not the name for it, because that seems to imply something, at least, of erudition and research; whereas this is that sort of fitting on of ready-made extracts from indexes and margins, and gazetteers, and magazines, which is the legi-. timate resource of provincial guide-books, and tours to Lakes and Watering-places, where it is easy to gain a few pages by› setting out from the Druids, and the Ancient Britons, and Boadicea. This class of literature, it fortunately does not fall within our province to notice; but we can hardly suppress our disgust when we find this beggarly process introduced into the classic and holy regions of the East, and obtruded upon our notice in the pages of a quarto volume.

There is yet a charge of a more serious nature which lies against this work, and which we will simply preface with an extract from the author's introductory observations :

At every step of a traveller's progress through Palestine, his indignation is so roused by attempted impositions on his judgment, and

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sometimes even on his senses, that his warm expression of it, in pouring forth epithets of contempt for such absurdities, may sometimes be conceived to display a contempt for religion itself. Whenever the reader meets with such passages, he is entreated, in the true spirit of that Christian charity "which is not easily provoked, which thinketh no evil, which heareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, crediteth all things," to put the most favourable construction on the passage that it will bear; AND IF

THE BEST OF THESE IS BAD, TO PASS IT BY.

"There are some anecdotes detailed, more particularly those witnessed at Jerusalem, which may be thought also unfit for the public eye, but they are too descriptive of the state of manners there, to be wholly omitted. If I have given a colouring to these, which is not in conformity with the reigning taste, I request the reader to pass them over in silence also, and attribute both these defects rather to my ignorance of the state of public feeling on these subjects, among my own countrymen, from having mixed much more with foreigners, than to any wish to shock the prejudices of the one class, or the delicacy of the other.'-p. xviii.

Decency and piety, then, are conceived by Mr. Buckingham to be mere matters of local fashion and convention; and should the reigning taste not revolt at it, he holds an author fully justified in disregarding both! He does, indeed, (in a wanton profanation of one of the most tender and beautiful passages of Scripture,) obligingly invite us to pass over such pages as offend.' As readers, we possibly might; as reviewers, we cannot and we have found accordingly, as he had led us to expect, a sneering and irreverent tone, in almost every paragraph where matters connected with sacred history are spoken of, and this upon those spots the most calculated to inspire very opposite sentiments in a well-regulated mind. Not unfrequently we detect him covertly aiming a sideblow at the miracles of the gospel.

"This lake (of Tiberias,) like the Dead Sea, with which it communicates, is, for the same reason, never violently agitated for any length of time. The same local features, however, render it occasionally subject to whirlwinds, squalls, and sudden gusts from the hollow of the mountains, which, as in every other similar basin, are of momentary duration, and the most furious gust is instantly succeeded BY A CALM.'-p. 468. (Note) And they launched forth: but as they sailed, Jesus fell asleep, and there came down a storm of wind on the lake, and they were filled with water, and were in jeopardy, and they came to him and awoke him, and said, Master, Master; we perish: and he rebuked the wind, and the raging of the sea, AND THERE WAS A CALM.--Luke, chap. viii.'

The drift and intention of this commentary cannot be mistaken, but the assertion itself is untrue; since, first of all, there are not the same causes of stillness in the waters of this lake as in that of the Dead Sea, whose specific gravity is so much greater that it has been proved by recent experiment, that persons unable to swim elsewhere, will actually float upon their surface; the ridges

of

of mountains, also, that border the Dead Sea, are higher, and more continuous, and nearer to the margin; so that there are fewer directions in which the winds can act upon it; while the effects from the snows on Libanus and Antilibanus, which are so near as to be sensibly felt at Tiberias, are too remote to extend to the other. These constitute very broad lines of distinction; and the fact is, that the lake of Tiberias is as subject as other lakes to violent and continued agitation, especially by winds blowing from the snowy summits to the northward; and whoever has seen the waves of the Lago di Garda, or even of Como, under such circumstances, will not talk slightingly either of the force or duration of a fresh-water tempest.

We have not room to comment upon the traveller's very tender and pathetic parting from his tried and well loved' friends at Alexandria, which he terms the most painful of all GUILTLESS feelings,' nor upon the thirty-two succeeding pages, which are consumed in a passage by sea, from Egypt to Syria, enlivened, as they are, with the customary ingredient of a storm; and shall therefore pass at once to the middle of the volume, where we first find him attached to Mr. Bankes's expedition. All that precedes, is drawn from Maundrel, Le Bruyn, Dr. Clarke, or the Gazetteer, with the exception of a few embellishments and errors, which are the writer's own.

We have early opportunities of remarking a rare degree of architectural and antiquarian sagacity. At Tyre, an aqueduct upon arches is ascribed to the time of the Macedonian conquest! it is, indeed, modestly termed

Merely a conjecture, that both the fountain and the aqueduct are the work of the same lofty and magnificent genius, who connected the Island of Tyre, like that of Clazomenæ, in the Gulph of Smyrna, to the Continent, and whose works of grandeur, made subservient to public utility, soften, in some degree, the darker shades of his all conquering character.

He is still more fortunate in his discovery of Canaanitish remains in the ditch at Acre. Whether it was the circumstance, alone, of their being in the ditch,' which led to this conclusion, he has not given us the means of knowing, and has thus left us with a painful misgiving upon our minds, that we may possibly, ourselves, have occasionally seen such Canaanitish remains,' without once suspecting it. Our faith, however, in his antiquarian references is somewhat shaken by observing how short a time he adheres to them himself. He says (p. 137.) of Cæsarea, the fort itself, as it stands, is EVIDENTLY a work of the Crusaders,'-two pages afterwards, describing a ruin at El Mukhelid, (Antipatris,) he tells us that it showed equally good masonry

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with that of the FORT OF CESAREA, THE STYLE OF WHICH IT RESEMBLED; and then goes on to enlarge upon a tower called Aphek,' by Josephus, (misconceiving this to have stood at Antipatris,) and concludes that the portion of the fortified building which still exists here, may be the remains of the identical building.' Thus of two structures, the style of which he himself observed to be similar, he would ascribe the one to the Crusaders, and the other to we know not whom, before the reign of Nero! Whatever objections there may be, however, to his inductions, two grand architectural discoveries in two buildings, which we had conceived to be sufficiently well-known, are enough to establish his reputation. The dome of St. Paul's is said to be of the same form with that of the great mosque at Jerusalem, that is to say, it contracts and curves inwards towards the bottom, a fact of which Sir Christopher Wren was not, we believe, aware : and a pair of stone doors (he assures us) are still hanging in the Pantheon at Rome' !+

As he seems to have had no suspicion that the existing walls at Cæsarea do not coincide with those of the Roman city, we are not surprized to find him asserting that the forum, theatre, &c. are not distinguishable;' whereas, had he strayed but a few paces beyond their circuit, to the southward, (if he knows the form of a Roman theatre at all,) he would very plainly have distinguished one. But we should weary the reader were we to enter into the wide field of all that he did not see, and did not inquire for. Neither have his inquiries (when he did make them) led to very accurate information. He says, (p. 90.) that 'the very ruins which remained of the house of St. Anna (at Sepphoury), had been entirely demolished:' whereas they then were, and probably still are, in precisely the same state as when visited by Dr. Clarke.

Our author would have us believe (p. 213.) that he understood and spoke Arabic better than Mr. Bankes's interpreter, who, he himself tells us, had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and who, we happen to know, had been resident several years at Cairo, and married to a wife there who spoke Arabic only. So high a degree of proficiency must (one would have supposed) have ensured great accuracy in all that he tells us of the local customs of the country. Did he then, at Caypha, make no in

*This Aphek was (from the context of the passage in Josephus) a place quite distinct from Antipatris, and apparently in the road from thence to Lydda. The King of Aphek is enumerated among those whom Joshua smote, (Josh. xii. 18.) and Apheca is spoken of, Joshua xv. 53. as allotted to the tribe of Judah. Tugyo, should be rendered here, therefore, (not a tower) but a fortress, or strong hold. It is probably in the same acceptation of the word, that Ergaτavos пugyos was the name of the place, upon whose site Cæsarea was afterwards founded.

+ These two curious particulars will be found in pages 205 and 208..

quiries?

quiries? or did his Arabic scholarship extend no farther than a few stammering names, for the mere necessaries of life? The population of Caypha (he says, p. 115.) being made up of Mahommedaus, Christians, and Druses, the women of the last-named. sect are distinguishable from both the others by a horn worn upon their heads, and from those also of their own persuasion upon Mount Libanus, by the fashion of pointing it backwards instead of forward. Now, as far as accuracy is of any value in such trifling details, here are at least three false statements. First, though Druses do frequent the markets, both of Acre and Caypha, they form no part of the population of either, and any women seen there wearing the horn, were most certainly not natives of the place: secondly, this could not serve to distinguish the Druse women from the Christians; since in every village where the two sects are intermixed, (and there are very few on mount Libanus, where they are not,) this form of head-dress obtains equally with those of both religions: and thirdly, in the different districts of Libanus, the horn is worn in every direction in which it is possible to protrude it; to the front, to the back, to the right side, to the left, and in every fanciful variation of obliquity.

Our accomplished traveller (designated, as he tells us he was, by the prior of Narazeth, as 'Milord Inglese, richissimo, affabilissimo, ed anche dottissimo') repays the compliment of the fathers to his learning, by continually harping upon their lamentable ignorance. We must remind him, however, that, ignorant as those. monks may be, there are many points upon which it is not proba-ble, and some upon which it is not even possible, that they can be so ill informed as himself. For instance, when he is willing at Jerusalem, to bring before us no very decorous picture of their manners and morals, he introduces us to the cook of the convent, not at all aware that the said cook was (and is always) simply a servant of the society, and a layman, wearing the habit: so that it is just as judicious in him to give us the details of this cook (even supposing them to be true) as a sample of the lives of the friars, as it would be in a foreigner to cite as a picture of an Oxford education, the incidental view of a scout tippling in an ale-, house!

Whilst we remark so much ignorance as to the internal economy of the convents where he resided, we give full credit to the penetration manifested, in discovering among its external dependencies, what is delicately termed, (p. 245.) 'the brothel of the Catholic monks'—an establishment of which, we are assured that travellers who have been often at Jerusalem, and long resident there, had never the good fortune to hear before. On his amour with the Abyssinian lady, which was so conducted that,

as