gument is used, where here we have only assertion and rhetoric, we shall be content with the glorious gospel of God and our Saviour, and preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

ART. VII.-THE HOLY LAND.

1. Pèlerinage en Terre-Sainte. Par L'ABBE AZAIS, Aumonier de Lycée Impérial de Nimes, L'Un des 40 Pèlerins de 1853. Paris: Etienne Giraud. 1855. 16mo, pp. 390.

2. Tent Life in the Holy Land. By WILLIAM C. PRIME. New York: Harpers. 1857. 12mo, pp. 510.

3. The Tent and the Khan, a Journey to Sinai and Palestine. By ROBERT WALTER STEWART, D.D., Leghorn. With Map and Illustrations. Edinburgh: William Oliphant & Sons. 1857. 8vo, pp. 544.

WE had supposed that the recent work of Dr Robinson had put to rest for the present, if not for all time to come, the vexed question of the genuineness of "the Holy Places." Certainly we could not expect that his conclusions would be doubted by any Protestant writer, much less by any careful investigator. The fulness, the minuteness, and the patient accuracy of his researches, seemed to give his opinion the weight of a final decision. We congratulated ourselves that a last word had been spoken, and that the incubus of tradition which had so long hindered the pleasure of travel in the Holy Land was finally lifted off. But we were too confident. Our inference was over-hasty. Just as we had resigned ourselves to the loss of a fruitful and favourite theme, its interest is suddenly re-awakened. Three new champions rush into the lists together, a Frenchman, a Scotchman, and an American, each eager to break a lance with the iconoclast scholar. The Frenchman appears as the defender of tradition and the theories of the Church Catholic against the broad and general ground of such heretics as the author of "Biblical Researches." The Scotchman ventures to set aside the verdict about Mount Sinai and the way of Israel in its journey. And the American, -strange to say,-going to Jerusalem in the faith that the Holy Sepulchre is a pious fraud, comes away a convert to its ancient claim.

All the three books before us are able, remarkable, and worthy of extended notice. The narrative of M. Azaïs is the

story of a real pilgrim, whose faith and enthusiasm are not a sentimental imitation, but a genuine reproduction, of the spirit of ancient pilgrimage. The end and motive of his voyage are religious. He goes to the Holy Land, not to criticise, but to pray; goes to fulfil a pious duty, and to enjoy a high religious privilege. He goes, as a good Catholic, to note and honour the noble works of his brethern in the faith, and to mourn over and expose the profanations of infidels, heretics, and schismatics on the sacred soil. There is a warmth, and depth, and earnestness in his expressions of feeling, which we rarely find in Protestant narratives. We do not discover here, as in Mr Prime's volumes, that rhetorical emotion, which seems to be written out at leisure, under the inspiration of a quiet cigar, which invents raptures very unnatural to the man and under the circumstances; but rather that more honest emotion, which tries in vain to tell all its fervour and its gratitude. The Scripture references are not selected from a concordance, but haunt and charm the traveller along his way. M. Azaïs is not one of those tourists who have diligently read up for the journey. Indeed, he manifests a painful ignorance of what mere travellers have written. But he has studied faithfully and well that larger guide-book, which relates the history of God's doings with his people, and the quaint and copious legends of the Church go along with him to embellish the fragments of biblical reminiscences. He tells us everything that has any religious interest, and he does not care to tell anything else; yet his book gives as fair a picture of life and manners as if its purpose were wholly secular. We may smile at his credulity, his hearty indorsement of monkish fables,— as where he tells of the blood of the second Adam running through the fissures in the rock, upon the head of the first Adam, who was buried under Calvary, or plucks a twig from the olive-tree planted on the spot where the Copts say that Abraham stood when about to sacrifice Isaac, or speaks of the arch of the "Ecce Homo" as of the time of Christ; yet this very credulity helps to make the story more complete and more delightful. It is a great deal more respectable than that affectation of reverence which coldly adopts pious phrases, and pretends to believe. Occasionally, however, the faith of the pilgrim is too severely taxed, and a shade of scepticism flits across his record. When they show him behind the altar of the Church of Santa Croce, in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, the place where the olive-tree was cut down to furnish wood for the cross, he naïvely remarks: "I do not like this mathematical precision. The tree may have been one of a grove which grew here, but it seems to me difficult to point out the exact spot which it occupied." He does not quite approve

the removal of the Holy Cradle from Bethlehem to Rome, but is consoled by the thought that it has at any rate "escaped the usurpations of the Greek schism," which would have stolen this, as it has stolen so many other relics. His patriotic pride would lead him to indorse the hypothesis of M. de Saulcy, who writes books of travel in the same fanciful way that Lamartine writes history; and accordingly he leaves undecided that question about the place of David's tomb, which the imaginative savant transported from its traditional site on Mount Zion to a more convenient place on the hill of Scopus. If he is pained by the ignorance of the Greek clergy, he remembers that God is just, and that these rebels are entitled to nothing better. If he praises the hospitalities of the good Latin friars, he cannot help regretting that they are so fond of their ease, and do so little, with such advantages, for the cause of sacred science. The small success of the Methodist missionary at Beera only leads him to hope that a Catholic missionary may go there and dispense to the inquiring natives the genuine milk of the word. He is ready with numerous reasons why the Santa Casa should have been transported to Loretto, though he prefers not to explain the miracle,—which he might easily have done, with the aid of modern "Spiritualism." If he allows the impossible theory that the eight olive-trees of Gethsemane are those beneath which our Saviour prayed, it is pleasant to see that he is betrayed, in a note, into the admission of the so-called "Tombs of the Kings" as the monument of Helena, queen of Adiabene.

The volume of Father Azaïs is a good specimen of a class which grows less from year to year. Indeed, he publishes it as if the record of a pilgrimage were in these days a strange and notable relation. Mr Prime's volume, on the contrary, is a good specimen of an increasing class. In spite of its faults, which are not few or slight, it is very readable, and has the elements of sure popularity. Its style is lively, clear, and (saving the egotism and the sentimentalism) generally tasteful. The wood-cuts, many of which are old favourites, help the picturesque effect. For its information and scientific value, the text might have been condensed to one-third of its present bulk, yet it is not tedious from its length. Some vulgarisms and some mistakes have escaped that careful revision which so practised a writer doubtless gave to his work; as where we read (p. 15), "more languages than was necessary to the scattering at Babel," or (p. 247), "Isaac was a very slow sort of man," "absolutely sold by his sharp son Jacob,"-or (p. 448), "what that row was I never knew, for I slept tremendously,' -or (p. 223), "we found it blowing great guns." There is sometimes inaccuracy in the use of names, as where he calls

Eustochium, the friend of Jerome, "Eustachia,"-suggesting an association of quite a different kind. It is fortunate that the general tenor of Mr Prime's speculations and criticism is so conservative, else some of his incidental remarks might bring him under suspicion of neology. Mentioning the miracle of Joshua in the valley of Ajalon, he observes that there is "a certain inconsistency" in the account of it, since it took place in the afternoon, while the sun was commanded to stand still on Gibeon, which town was to the east of the speaker. "I believe it has been suggested," cautiously adds Mr Prime, "that the account of this miracle is an interpolation in the text, and a careful reading of it, I think, indicates that it has not the same authorship with what precedes and follows it." In the Garden of Gethsemane, again, the party discuss the characters of the Apostles, and a doubt is intimated whether the common view of Judas and his treason is the correct view.

We are afraid, however, that Mr Prime will find it harder to set himself right with the "Temperance community." The wines and spirits of Syria and the East are a subject on which he loves to descant, and he dwells upon their virtues with all the zest of an experienced epicure. It is always one of his chief concerns to get something good to drink, and the pleasure of journeying and sight-seeing depends very much upon the quality of the fluids in the canteen. We cannot at all assent to his remark, that "it requires a very hard head indeed to escape sober from an Eastern convent." The reverend

fathers, certainly, keep good wines and liquors, as Mr Prime says; but they press them only upon those guests who evidently love them and are willing to pay for them. We are confident that Mr Prime's style of intercourse with the Superior of the Latin convent of Jerusalem is not the usual style; certainly, we have not read it in any other book of travels, nor is it according to our own memory. The following sentence reminds us forcibly of the aesthetic and pious sensualism of the "Lady Alice's" school of novels. "I entered the room of the venerable Superior, a noble-looking man, with whom I I had had not a little pleasant intercourse. Seated in his divan, I drank a glass of rosolio, and another of awakee, and, after chatting a few moments, went up to the room of the Procurator-General, where I was accustomed to look at a splendid Murillo, a picture of St John in the Wilderness, which adorned its wall, and in front of which we usually found much better tipple than John had in the wilderness."

Mr Prime has a most self-sufficient and comical habit of assuming that he and his party do and see things which none before him have done or seen. He imagines that his landing at Jaffa, which was accomplished pretty much as all landings

of foreigners are accomplished in Oriental ports, taught the Jaffa porters a novel lesson. He has "reason to believe" that no private individual before himself ever hoisted the American flag in Syria, and gives us to understand that there was uncommon valour in displaying to hostile Arabs "the stars and the stripes." Any dragoman could have told him that such a display is frequent on the plain of Sharon, and that the imposing menace of half-a-dozen revolvers was wholly superfluous in defence of that harmless bunting. The cavern under Mount Bezetha, which Mr Prime presents to his readers as a novelty, had been discovered, explored, described in print, and described in lectures to American audiences, before the date of his visit to Jerusalem. We do not believe, either, that Mr Prime's account of the mishap which follows the first mounting of an Arabian horse is the usual, much less, as he calls it, the "invariable" form of initiation into that pastime. We have seen many Americans take first lessons in Arabian equitation, but have never witnessed any such spectacle as is described in the following incomprehensible paragraph, in which the nature of the catastrophe is as uncertain as the application of the pronouns. "When the horse sprang off on the first jump, the rider broke his back over the board which stands up behind the saddle, then, drawing the rein fiercely, threw his horse down upon his haunches, and went over on his neck behind the ears."

For a writer wonted to story-telling, Mr Prime is singularly abstemious in fanciful episodes. He favours us, as is most proper, with an account of his sensations as he does reverence at shrines, and tells how he wept and knelt; but he rarely indulges in side-histories, preferring the substantial facts of chibouks and coffee to the medieval legends which it takes too much trouble to work up. The story of Foulque Nerra, the Pilgrim, evidently tired its author before he finished it; and he had not courage to get up a new tale of the Wandering Jew from the tempting interview which he had with an old Hebrew in the valley of Jehoshaphat. The "Ben Israel" chapter is a failure. It is too short for a story, and too long for an incident.

We might expect that a Catholic pilgrim like Father Azaïs would uphold the genuineness of the holy places, and maintain with firmness the traditions of his Church. But we were not prepared to see an educated Protestant so suddenly renounce his previous opinion, and, on such unsatisfactory grounds, go over to the side of ecclesiastical invention. Mr Prime does not, indeed, indorse all the legends of monkery in Palestine as part of his belief. He stigmatises many of the elics of our Saviour's time as of quite modern origin, pro