one time with wood. It was also celebrated for the vineyards which clothed its sides. But its remoteness as the border country of Palestine, and the wildness characteristic of pastoral highlands, rather than either its loftiness or its inaccessibility, must be alluded to in the language of the prophet, Amos ix. 2, 3.

At four hours distance from the promontory of Carmel, keeping along the coast, the Travellers had to enter a passage cut out of a bed of rock, called Waad-el-Ajal, literally, the valley of the shadow of death;' the centre of which was just broad enough for the passage of a wheeled carriage or a laden camel, while there were raised causeways on each side. The passage was very short, and there were appearances of its having once been closed by a gate, as places for hinges were still to be seen. It was from some similar pass, in all probability, that the Son of Jesse borrowed the figure of which he makes so sublime a use in the twenty-third Psalm.

At Cæsarea, by the Arabs still called Kissary, Mr. Buckingham observed the remains of a building with fine Roman arches, many of which were entire, and some granite columns, which would seem with strong probability to be referred to the time of Herod. The fort is the work of the Crusaders. Pococke's plan of the coast at this point, is stated to be accurate, but the supposed sites of the ancient edifices, are mere mounds of indefinable form, which can afford no basis for topographical conjectures. The small village of El Mukhalid, which occupies a very fine situation in a fertile tract, about seventeen miles from Cæsarea, is the supposed representative of Antipater.

At Jaffa, (Joppa, now called Yafah,) Mr. Buckingham says he was anxious to ascertain the fact of Bonaparte's having murdered his prisoners there in cold blood. In reply to his inquiries, he was assured by Signor Damiani, the English Consul,' an old man of sixty, and a spectator of all that passed here during the French invasion,' that such massacre did really take place; and 'twenty mouths,' he adds, "were opened at once to confirm the tale.'

The warm recommendation of the President of Nazareth procured for our Traveller, on his arrival at Jerusalem, the most courteous reception at the Latin convent of the Terra Sancta. The friars, with the exception of two Italians, were all Spaniards, grossly ignorant, bigoted, and morose. The prospect of the re-establishment of the Inquisition in Spain, under the wise and pious Ferdinand, was spoken of by them with exultation. Let the Inquisition reign,' they said, and the Church will be secure. Let the Cross triumph, and the Holy Sepulchre shall soon be redeemed from the hands of

infidels by another crusade, in which all our injuries will be avenged.' Gloom and jealousy reigned throughout the establishment, and nothing was talked of by the holy grumblers, but their sufferings and hardships, and the difficulty of obedience, while ardent desires were expressed to return to Europe, or to be sent any where, rather than continue at Jerusalem. • Not even in a solitary instance did I hear,' says Mr. Buckingham, a word of resignation, or of the joy of suffering for 'Christ's sake, or of the paradise found in a life of mortifica

tion, so often attributed to these men.' Chateaubriand's Spanish friar, who represented the life he had led for fifty years in the Holy Land as un vero paradiso, must, he concludes, have been, if not a hypocrite, a rare instance of monastic felicity.

We shall not follow our Author in his tour to the holy places, not one of which is capable of being identified. As specimens of the imbecile legends which the visiter would dispute at his peril, it will be sufficient to enumerate, the bridge over the brook Kedron, off of which the Jews are affirmed to have pushed Jesus in his way to the house of Caiaphas, although the work appears to be scarcely a century old; the large stone below, on which are shewn the impression of his feet in falling; the old tank and the large reservoir which contend for the honour of being Bathsheba's pool; the identical window of the identical castle out of which King David was looking when he fell in love with the wife of Uriah,-the said castle being evidently of Saracen execution; the stone from which our Lady' ascended to heaven; the rock on which Peter and the sons of Zebedee slept while their Master retired to pray; the paved way where Judas betrayed him with a kiss; the sepulchre of Lazarus; the spot on which Martha met our Lord in his way to Bethany; the grotto where the Apostles compiled the Creed, &c. &c. We confess that the manner in which Dr. Clarke speaks of these clumsy forgeries, is much more to our taste than the excessive candour of Mr. Buckingham. The genuine tendency of the superstition which has originated them, is strikingly illustrated by the following cir

cumstance.

The possession of this spot, (the cave of the Nativity at Bethlehem,) once so mean and insignificant, is now disputed by contending sects of Christians with the same rage and animosity as that which marks their struggle for the Holy Sepulchre. During the last Christmas only, at the celebration of the feast of the Nativity, at which Mr. Bankes was present, a battle took place, in which several of the combatants were wounded, and others severely beaten; and on the preceding year, the privilege of saying mass at the altar on that particular day, had been fought for at the door of the sanctuary itself, with drawn swords....... Pococke observed in his time,

that the Christians at Jerusalem, Bethlehem, St. John's, and Nazareth, were worse than any other Christians. "I was informed," says he," that the women of Bethlehem are very good, whereas those at Jerusalem are worse than the men, who are generally better there than at the other places. This may be occasioned by the great converse which the women have there with those of their own sex, who go thither as pilgrims; and I will not venture to say whether too great a familiarity with those places in which the sacred mysteries of our redemption were acted, may not be a cause to take off from the reverence and awe which they should have for them, and lessen the influence they ought to have on their conduct." pp. 221-3.

Our Author's account of his own feelings at visiting what he terms the venerated tomb of the Living God,' is couched in so equivocal a phraseology, as to be adapted to awake some perhaps uncharitable surmises as to the character of his real senti

ments.

To enter here, and kneel before the shrine, and kiss the marble that encases it, with absolute indifference, I should hold `to be impossible; but if I were asked what were the sentiments that possessed me at the moment of bowing before the altar, I should say with Chateaubriand, that it would be impossible for me to describe them, and that such a train of ideas presented themselves at once to my mind, that none remained for a moment fixed there. My feelings, however, though equally indescribable as his own, were, I believe, of a very different kind.'

We should not have imagined that there was any impossibility in defining the emotion which the scene subsequently described, must have called up in a pious and rational mind. And as to the holy sepulchre itself, although Mr. Buckingham combats with some earnestness the arguments adduced by Dr. Clarke to shew that the whole is a monkish juggle,' he is obliged at last to content himself with the lame conclusion, that the sepulchre may have contained' the Saviour's body. He is guilty of a most unwarrantable insinuation, when he accuses Dr. Clarke of talking of the naïveté of the tradition,' and of a farrago of 'absurdities,' and all this trumpery,' in a way that would al'most lead one to infer that he doubted the facts of the story altogether.' There is, assuredly, nothing in the expressions he cites, to afford the least colour to so grossly calumnious an imputation. Surely,' adds our Author, it is not the calling this tomb of the Living God, "a dusty fabric standing like a huge pepper-box in the midst of the church," that can disprove its having contained the lifeless corpse of the Great Creator of the Universe.' Nor does Dr. Clarke rest his arguments on so slender a basis, but on facts at absolute variance with the legend; and to us, his reasoning appears decisive, notwithstanding the feeble may-be's by which it is attempted to controvert it. The

expressions, the tomb of God,' and 'the corpse of the Great Creator and Director of the Universe,' are not such as we should think the more highly of a writer's orthodoxy for employing. Such over bold' affirmations, Hooker justly condemus as a confounding in the person of Christ those natures which "they should distinguish; the heresy charged on the followers of Eutyches.* Nor is it by any means consistent with our Author's indescribable feelings, and his captiousness towards Dr. Clarke, to speak of the supposed conduct of Helena in cutting away the sepulchre, in order to turn an excavation into a grotto above ground, as quite as much in consonance with common reason as any other part of this old lady's conduct, in performing a pilgrimage at eighty, or, indeed, perhaps, as reasonable as performing one at all.' If Mr. Buckingham thinks so, what are we to think of all his'affected reverence for the sepulchre itself which the old lady' is said to have discovered and enshrined?

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But some of our Author's emotions on this occasion, it is easy to divine. Their stay in the sepulchre itself was very short. The scene of confusion and the suffocating closeness of the atmosphere within, soon drove them into purer air.

In reviewing again the different chapels in which the various worship of the Latins, Greeks, Armenians, Copts, and Abyssinians was all going on at once, and that too in every diversity of manner, nothing was more striking than the religious pride of the worshippers of each sect, which made them cast down a look of contempt on those of the others, as men irretrievably lost in error, though we ourselves, who belonged professedly to none, were for that reason treated with respect by all. From a number of lesser incidents which passed under our own eyes, we could perfectly believe and understand what Maundrell had said of the church here, in his day, and which remains unaltered to the present. The same Traveller's description of the ceremony of the holy fire, of which he was himself an eyewitness, is a faithful but disgraceful picture of the scenes transacted here from one end of the year to the other, and inclines one to call the church of the holy sepulchre at Jerusalem, a temple combining the most surprising mixture of credulity and imposition, devotion and wickedness, that has ever issued from any one source since the world began. That which I myself witnessed, confirmed to me all that I had heard and seen of the vile appropriation of religion here to the worst of purposes, and induced me to believe what I had at first thought at least a highly coloured picture, though painted by the chaste, the accurate, and the pious Maundrell. p. 252.

In our review of Mr. Jolliffe's Letters from Palestine,t we ventured some remarks on the site of the Crucifixion, which

Eccl. Polity. B. v. § 54. † Ecl. Rev. N. S. Vol. XIII. p. 170.

that gentleman has done us the honour to insert in the second edition of that work. Mr. Buckingham's retrospective view of Jerusalem amply justifies the suspicions we expressed as to the authenticity of the tradition which makes the place called Golgotha or Calvary, a mount' in the centre of the present city. He admits that there are well founded objections to the hypothesis on which all the plans of the ancient city have been constructed, by which Mount Calvary is placed without the walls. Instead of the present city having gained in a northern direction, so as to admit the hill Calvary, (a supposition made necessary by that bypothesis,) be conceives it to have lost the whole intervening space between the present walls and the Tomb of Helena, where. the old walls passed on the North. But unwilling to concede that Dr. Clarke is right in disputing the identity of Calvary, he attempts to get rid of this objection, by denying that the place of crucifixion 'must necessarily have been without the ancient walls. It is strange enough, that while examining, as he appears to have done with some attention, the statements of the Evangelists, he should have overlooked the express remark of St. John, that "the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city," as well as the declaration of the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that our Lord "suffered without the gate." Mr. Buckingham labours to set aside the objection, that the sepulchre, as a place of burial, must have been without the walls. He takes no notice of the still stronger fact, that Calvary was a place, not simply of burial, but of public execution. Dr, Lightfoot, however, has collected a variety of passages from Jewish writers, to shew that no sepulchres, except those of the family of David, were permitted to be within the city, and that a dead body was not allowed to remain within the walls even for a night.

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'But on what authority,' he exclaims, is Calvary called a 'mount? Upon no Scriptural authority, as we have already remarked*, nor, so as far we have been able to discover, for any other solid reason. The expression" without the gate," would seem to point to a place just without one of the gates of the city, in going out of which they met with Simon "coming out of the country;"-probably by the side of the high road, so that all they that passed by might see the spectacle; and" nigh unto the city," because there was obviously no motive for going to a great distance. Jerusalem, then, being built upon a hill, the place in question must rather have been on lower ground than the city, which corresponds with the representation that in that place was a garden." Mr. Buckingham's object in questioning whether Calvary was a mount, is, indeed, to shew that the site

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VOL. XVII. N. S.