Cæsarea. The small ruins that remain of a place, the former splendor of which is so amply proved by Josephus, are still called Kissary by the Arabs: but all is now, in the words of the present traveller, a scene of silent desolation. He has traced its history from its foundation by Herod before the commencement of our æra, but is not enabled to state the time or causes of its demolition, which has clearly not been simply the work of time. We know that, about three centuries since, there were as little remains, or nearly as little, as are to be found at the present time; and we may clearly infer that it outlived or at least saw the fall of the Greek empire, though probably it had itself much "fallen from its high estate" long before.

• The fragments of granite pillars, and other marks of splendour seen near the sea, are unquestionably remains of the ancient Cæsarea of Herod; but the fort itself, as it now stands, is as evidently a work of the Crusaders, who had one of their chief military stations here. The great city extended itself from the sea-shore to some distance inland; but its ruin is so complete, that the most diligent survey would scarcely be rewarded by the fixing with accuracy the site of any of the public buildings, or even the delineation of its precise form from the foundation of its walls.

The plan of Cæsarea given by Pococke is a tolerably accurate -outline of the portion of the coast on which its ruins stand, as well as of the fortress there; but the mounds in which he thought he could recognise the sites of the tower of the Drusus, Cæsar's temple, the colossal statues of Augustus and of Rome, the forum, and the theatre, are mere masses of indefinable form, and without a feature that could assist to distinguish the one from the other.

At the present moment, the whole of the surrounding country is also a sandy desert towards the land; the waves wash the ruins of the moles, the towers, and the port, toward the sea; and not a creature resides within many miles of this silent desolation.'

From Cæsarea Mr. B.'s route lay by Jaffa (Joppa) and Ramlah to Jerusalem. No modern traveller has halted at the former of these places without some inquiries respecting the authenticity of the stories related of Bonaparte. Of the alleged murder of his own sick soldiers, no mention is here made: but of the massacre of the prisoners an account is given by Mr. B. in the following extract:

The fact of Bonaparte's having murdered his prisoners here in cold blood had been doubted, from the mere circumstances of the consul having omitted to mention it, though he had not been once questioned as to the point. This, however, I was resolved to do; and in reply we were assured by this same consul's son, Damiani, himself 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 were opened at once to confirm the tale.

It was related to us, that Bonaparte had issued a decree, ordering that no one should be permitted to pass freely without having a written protection bearing his signature; but publishing at the same time an assurance that this should be granted to all who would apply for it on a given day. The multitude confided in the promise, and were collected on the appointed day without the city, to the number of ten or twelve hundred persons, including men, women, and children. They were then ordered on an eminence, and there arranged in battalion, under pretence of counting them one by one. When all was ready, the troops were ordered to fire on them, and only a few escaped their destructive vollies. A similar scene was transacted on the bed of rocks before the port, where about three hundred persons were either shot or driven to perish in the sea, as if to renew the deeds of treacherous murder which the men of Joppe had of old practised on the Jews, and which their heroic defender had so amply avenged.'

We are sorry that Mr. B. deemed it necessary to prove Ramlah, or Ramah, to be the birth-place and burial-place of the prophet Samuel. The similarity of name (which is not an uncommon one in Syria, and signifies high place,) seems to have misled him; the city of Samuel being at a considerable distance from Jaffa, and only a few miles from Jerusalem, in the mountains of Ephraim. (Vid. Calmet's Dict. in verb. Ramah.) From this place the traveller pursued the route over the mountains to Jerusalem, with the approach to which he was very little struck: but he seems to have viewed it at first from the most unfavorable side, so that his description by no means contradicts that of others. He subsequently describes the view of it as taken from the mount of Olives, whence it may be seen with greater advantage than from almost any other spot.

We have written so much, and so lately, on the modern state of this city, together with its real and pseudo-antiquities, and we find so little in the present description that differs from what we have derived from other travellers, that we must hold ourselves excused from taking our readers again over the same ground: but we must observe, in justice to Mr. B., that his tour in the immediate environs of the city gives more precise ideas of the objects visited, and their relative positions to each other and to Jerusalem, than previous writers have conveyed to us.

On the three most conspicuous of the tombs, vulgarly called those of Zacharias, of Absalom, and of the kings, Dr. Clarke has expended terms of praise both as to magnitude and execution, which seem by Mr. Buckingham's admeasurements and descriptions to be little suitable to the occasion of them. The latter remarks on the incongruity of the several parts of

them,

them, presenting specimens of architecture which have no affinity to each other either as to age or country; and this, we imagine, may be rather an argument for than against the antiquity of some of them, with reference not merely to the date of their erection, but also to the length of time during which they have been esteemed a species of sacred relics. The justice or the injustice of their appropriation is a different question. The well-known French traveller, M. de Chateaubriand, took a different view of this matter, and considered the architecture of these mausoleums as decisive against their having existed in the ages which are assigned for their erection. From their present appearance, he would presume them to have been built about the time "when an alliance was formed between the Jews and Macedonians under the first of the Maccabees;" an epoch so obscurely expressed that we confess we do not comprehend it, and have no idea to what alliance that author refers: unless he means the period of the subjection of Judæa to the Macedonian kings of Egypt, or the subsequent Syrian dominion before the time of the Maccabees. However this may be, he proceeds to observe that the monuments in the valley of Jehoshaphat, and more especially the royal sepulchres, furnish a striking example of the mixture of Grecian and Egyptian orders; whence, he adds, resulted that anomaly in architecture which formed a kind of link between the Pyramids and the Parthenon.-We rather incline to Mr. Buckingham's opinion, as expressed relative to one of these remains; and which, with some variation, may be transferred to more of them. Writing on the reputed tomb of Zacharias, he says:

Passing onward, we came to the monument which is called the Tomb of Zacharias: it is a square mass of rock hewn down into form, and isolated from the quarry out of which it is cut, by a passage of twelve or fifteen feet wide on three of its sides; the fourth or western front being open towards the valley and to Mount Moriah, the foot of which is only a few yards distant. This square mass is eight paces in length on each side, and about twenty feet high in the front, and ten feet high_at_the back, the hill on which it stands having a steep ascent. It has four semi-columns cut out of the same rock on each of its faces, with a pilaster at each angle, all of a bastard Ionic order, and ornamented in bad taste. The architrave, the full moulding, and the deep overhanging cornice which finishes the square, are all perfectly after the Egyptian manner; and the whole is surmounted by a pyramid, the sloping sides of which rise from the very edges of the square below, and terminate in a finished point. The square of this monument is one solid mass of rock, as well as its semi-columns on each face; but the surmounting pyramid appears to be of masonry: its

sides, however, are perfectly smooth, like the coated pyramids of Saecara and Dashour, and not graduated by stages, as the pyramids of Gizeth in Egypt.

• Inconsiderable in size, and paltry in its ornaments, this monument is eminently curious, from the mixture of styles which it presents. There is no appearance of an entrance into any part of it; so that it seems, if a tomb, to have been as firmly closed as the Egyptian pyramids themselves; perhaps from the same respect for the inviolability of the repose of the dead. The features before described gave the whole such a strangely mixed character, that there seemed no other solution of the problem which it offered, than that of supposing the plain square monument, the moulding, the broad cornice, and the pyramid above, to be a work of the Jewish age, as partaking of the style of the country in which their fathers had sojourned so long; and, admitting the bastard Ionic columns and pilasters raised from the mass on each of its sides to have been the ornamental work of a more modern period, added either out of veneration for the monument itself, or on its transfer by dedication to some other purpose. At the present moment it is surrounded by the graves of Jews, and its sides are covered with names inscribed in Hebrew characters, evidently of recent execution.'

Mr. Jolliffe represents M. de Chateaubriand as inaccurate in speaking of the pilasters on this and two other buildings as of the Doric order; which, agreeing with Mr. Buckingham, he represents to be a kind of bastard Ionic. Some remains of the latter style in the same vicinity probably led to a confused recollection in the French traveller.

"Siloa's brook, that flowed

(MILTON, 1. 1-11,)

Fast by the oracle of God" appeared to Mr. Buckingham only a dirty little brook, with scarcely any water in it, and he heard that even in the rainy season it was only an insignificant and muddy stream: - but Mr. Jolliffe found the water clear, when he saw it, although of a harsh and unpleasant flavor. Sandys gives so very different an account of this place, that it seems scarcely possible that tradition has not varied as to the spot itself since his days. "In a gut of the hill, above which in the wall stood the tower, was the fish-pool of Siloa, containing not above half an acre of ground; now dry in the bottome: and beyond the fountaine that fed it, now no other than a little trench walled in on the sides, full of filthy water, whose upper part is obscured by a building," &c. (P. 188. edit. 1627.)

It is still deemed among many of the Jews one of the greatest blessings to end their days at Jerusalem, and to obtain a burial in the valley of Jehoshaphat, for which purpose the more devout of them come from distant parts of the

world;

world; and it is certain that immense prices are paid by them for the privilege of depositing their bones on this venerated spot. Pococke is said to have observed a considerable resemblance in the site of this city to that of Dartmouth in Devonshire, and that of Dingwall in Scotland; which remark, if correct, may possibly assist the ideas of persons who are acquainted with either of these two towns.

We must now arrest our steps in following those of Mr. Buckingham; and with regard to his journey over the mountains of Gilead, his visits to Geraza, and his account of other remarkable places in the antient Decapolis, we must refer the reader to the work itself. As to the execution of the volume, generally, our opinion may be inferred from the remarks already made. We are not inclined to question Mr. B.'s merits as a diligent and attentive observer; and if a variety of errors may be detected in his pages, we deem it no more than reasonable to be somewhat indulgent to them, when we recollect the early circumstances of the author's life, which could not have permitted him to acquire the erudition that alone could enable him to compete with Shaw, Pococke, and Clarke. For some inaccuracies, indeed, an ample apology may be pleaded in the following short statement; which should induce us rather to wonder at the accomplishment of so much, than to be dissatisfied if perfection has not been attained. 'My journeys,' says Mr. B., were often through countries where writing, drawing, or minutely surveying any subject, would have been fatal; where we often travelled with our hands upon our swords, and our eyes keenly watching for secret plunderers, or more open enemies.' (Pref.)

Of the embellishments of the volume, we are told that most of the maps and plans were made from the author's actual observation: but a little disingenuousness, or at least a want of explicitness, appears in speaking of the numerous vignettes. Many of these are also said to be original, but it is implied that others are not when we are told that appropriate subjects have been selected from other sources. The fact should have been clearly stated that Le Bruyn, or Le Brun, who travelled in 1674-1693, has here been freely laid under contribution; and it should not be concealed that views which were correct at that period cannot now be equally accurate. We may mention particularly the vignettes at pages 32. 144. 171. 231. and 478. as evidently derived from Le Brun, pages 177. 249, 250. 261. and 320. (Voyage au Levant, folio, Delft, 1700,) and the vignette at p. 342., shewing the ruins at Jerash, is inconsistent with the description which follows, and which proves that those ruins are now much more dilapidated