the only state in which it could be viewed by a person of enlightened sensibility, with the appropriate emotion of melancholy complacency.

In a

But we must introduce to our readers the Author. long prefatory narrative, Mr. Buckingham challenges the respectful attention of the public, by a detail of the circumstances which peculiarly qualified him for his undertaking, At the age of ten, he was taken prisoner by the Spaniards, and marched through the finest parts of Spain and Portugal, which, captive as he was, excited all his youthful enthusiasm. A series of voyages to America, the Bahama Islands, and the West Indies, subsequently strengthened, instead of allaying, his passion for exploring distant regions. The Mediterranean next became the scene of his wanderings; and he now applied himself, with more than common ardour, to the reading of every book within his reach, that was likely to extend his knowledge of the interesting countries by which he was surrounded. Unfavourable as are the incessant duties and the hardy life of a sailor, to such pursuits, every moment he could spare from the vigilant watch which squalls, and storms, and pirates, and the complicated claims of navigation and commerce, constantly demanded, was given, he says, to these studies. Sicily, Malta, Greece, the islands of the Archipelago, the coasts of Asia Minor, gave him only a foretaste, but a most delicious one,' of what it was yet reserved for him to enjoy. Alexandria at length received him into her port. He beheld the Pharos, the Catacombs, Cleopatra's Obelisk, and Pompey's Pillar; then, ascending the Nile, he visited the Pyramids, the ruins of Heliopolis, and of Tentyra. At Thebes he remained a week. At Esneh, he met the lamented Burckhardt, and the Travellers spent several days together. They then pursued their journey in different directions; Mr. Burckhardt setting off for the Desert, and our Author continuing his course up the stream. He reached the Cataracts; and his curiosity being excited by intelligence of the wonderful monuments still beyond, he re-embarked, and penetrated beyond the Nubiau frontier. The temples of Daboat, of Taefa, and Galabshee; the quarries and inscriptions of Gartaasy; the stupendous cavern, with its alley of sphinxes and colossal statues, at Garfeecy; and the highly finished sculptures of the beautiful temple of Dukkey, rewarded the undertaking; monuments which, in his opinion, belong to a higher class of art than even those of Egypt. On his return, attempting to pass through the Desert, he was robbed of money, papers, arms, instruments, and clothes, and had to retrace his steps to Kosseir, naked and barefoot, scorched by day, and frozen by night, and during two days without food or water. This adventure had nearly proved fatal to him. Nothing daunted or tamed, however, by this reverse, on his return

to Cairo, he applied with fresh zeal to the study of Arabic. Af ter making some progress in it, assuming the dress of an Egyptian Fellah, he crossed the desert of Suez to examine its port, returned by a more northern route to explore the traces of the ancient canal which connected the Nile with the Arabian Gulf, visited Bubastis, Tanis, and the Lake of Menzaleh in Lower Egypt, crossed from Damietta along the edge of the Delta to Rosetta, and finally returned to Alexandria.

After spending some time in the prosecution of his Arabic studies, he again left Alexandria for Cairo, from which place he 'set out, disguised as a Mamlook, in company with a caravan of five thousand camels, for Mecca. The vessel in which they embarked at Suez, upset in a squall, and he again narrowly escaped with the loss of all that he possessed, except his papers. Qu his arrival at Jedda, he was too ill to prosecute his intended pilgrimage, and was happy in meeting with a ship under English colours from India, on board of which he recovered rapidly. While lying off the coast, he had the high gratification of another interview with Mr. Burckhardt, then at Mecca on pilgrimage, to whom he despatched a messenger: he came down to see him, and remained with him several days. Mr. Buckingham then sailed for Bombay, and after a stay of some months in India, returned again to Egypt. He landed at Mokha, and thence pursuing his passage up the Red Sea in native vessels, touched at every port and creek from Bab-el-Mandeb to Suez. He met Mr. Burckhardt a third time at Cairo, on the point of setting out, as he then thought, for the interior of Africa.' Being then requested to become the bearer of a treaty of commerce on the part of Mahommed Ali Pasha, to his friends in India, the passage of the Red Sea being shut by the prevalence of southerly winds, Mr. Buckingham again embarked with the intention of following the route of Syria and Mesopotamia. At this period, the travels described in the present volume, commence. The Author sailed from Alexandria, on Christmas day, 1815, in a vessel called a shuktoor, peculiar to the navigation of the Syrian coast; about thirty feet in length, its extreme breadth fifteen, and about forty tons burthen. The captain and his crew were Syrian Arabs of the Greek religion, not one of whom appeared to have any knowledge of navigation. A Syrian Turk, a respectable Arab trader from Tunis, some Moors, a Syrian Christian merchant and his servants, were passengers. They had not long been at sea before the wind shifted from the southwest to the opposite quarter, and it continued contrary, with alternate calms, which left them at the mercy of the strong current of the Nile, for nearly ten days. During this time, the crew and the passengers were unanimous for returning to port; but our Author, by dint of bribes and threats, and by inspiring the

sailors with a confidence in his direction, prevailed on them to hold on their course, till at length their situation became extremely perilous, and all his skill and energy were required at the helm, to prevent the ship from fouudering. On the 6th of January, at sunrise, to their inexpressible joy, land was seen, which proved to be the high and even range of Ras-el-Nakhora, to the northward of the Bay of Acre. Before noon, the vessel was safely within the haven of Soor, the ancient Tyre, and our Author quitted the shuktoor, determined to prosecute his journey by land.

In the court of the house where he was lodged at Soor, Mr. Buckingham had an opportunity of observing a female divested of her outer robes.

Her garments then appeared to resemble those of the Jewish women in Turkey and Egypt: the face and bosom were exposed to view, and the waist was girt with a broad girdle fastened by massy silver clasps. This woman, who was a Christian, wore also on her head a hollow silver horn, rearing itself upwards obliquely from her forehead, being four or five inches in diameter at the root, and pointed at its extreme;* and her ears, her neck, and her arms were laden with rings, chains, and bracelets. The first peculiarity very forcibly reminded me of the expression of the Psalmist: "Lift not up thine horn on high, speak not with a stiff neck." "All the horns of the wicked will I cut off, but the horns of the righteous shall be exalted." Similar illustrations of which, Bruce had also found in Abyssinia, in the silver horns of warriors and distinguished men. last (peculiarity) recalled to my memory the species of wealth which the chosen Israelites were commanded to borrow from the Egyptians, at the time of their departure from among them, and of the spoils taken in their wars with the Canaanites, whom they dispossessed, when it is stated, that many shekels of silver and gold were produced on melting down the bracelets, the ear-rings, and other ornaments of the women and children whom they had made captive. Most of the women that we saw, wore also silver bells, or other appendages of precious metal, suspended by silken cords to the hair of the head, and large high wooden pattens, which gave them altogether a very singular appearance.' p. 50.

The

From Soor, our Traveller proceeded to Acre, with a view to obtain the firman of the Pasha to secure a safe passage through his dominions; but, on arriving there, he had the mortification to learn that the Pasha had departed on the morning of the pre

* The women of the sect of Druses, some of whom our Author saw at Caypha, wear a horn pointing backwards from the crown of the head, which distinguishes them from those of other sects, as well as from the Druses of Mount Lebanon, who are stated to wear a similar horn pointing forwards,

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 útterly 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 Saracenie 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. Buckingliam 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 demolished, 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 overbung 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.