ried all along to the north of Mount Moriah, it must have passed where the house of Pilate is now shewn, which part might be filled up with the ruins of the Temple. If the Christians, when they had possession of Jerusalem, had dug here and in other parts, especially to the east of the Temple, and to the south of Mount Zion, they might, without doubt, have found great remains of the materials of the Temple and of the palaces on Mount Zion, and probably have been able to pass some judgement on the architecture of them. This fossée does not seem to be the pool of Bethesda, which, by all accounts, must have been to the south, or about the south-west of Mount Moriah. In St. Jerome's time, there were two pools, one filled by the rain; the other was of reddish water, as if it retained the colour of the sacrifices; and I suppose it was about the gardens to the south of the church of the purification, which is within the site of the court of the Temple; and the quarter called Ophel was also probably in this part of the city. For it was at the south corner of the Temple, where the Nethinims lived, who had the care of the sacrifices, and might extend to the north part of the hill or valley." .

Descending into the valley from St. Stephen's gate, the traveller comes to the bed of the brook Kedron, which is but a few paces over. This brook is stated by Pococke, to have its rise a little way further to the north, but its source does not appear to have been ascertained. Like the Ilissus, it is dry at least nine months in the year; its bed is narrow and deep, which indicates that it must formerly have been the channel for waters that have found some other and

• Pococke's Travels, book i. chap. 3.

probably subterranean course. There is now no water in it, except after heavy rains. A bridge is thrown over it a little below the gate of St. Stephen; and they say, that when there is water, unless the torrent swells much, which very rarely occurs, it all runs under ground to the north of this bridge. The course of the brook is along the Valley of Jehoshaphat, to the south-west corner of the city, and, then, turning to the south, it runs to the Dead Sea.

Passing over this bridge, a descent of several steps to the left conducts the traveller to the sepulchre of the Blessed Virgin; a lofty and spacious vault or cave, (Chateaubriand terms it a subterraneous church,) hewn with surprising labour in a stratum of hard compact lime-stone, and there can be no doubt that the persons here interred, must have been held in high veneration, or of distinguished rank. Neither Eusebius, Epiphanius, nor Jerome, however, mentions a syllable to authorise the tradition. The earliest notice of this sepulchre as that of the Virgin, occurs in the writings of Adamnanus, the Irish monk, who described it from the testimony of Arculfus, in the seventh century; and it is mentioned by another writer, who lived in the beginning of the eighth.* These are authorities undeserving of attention, when opposed to the negative evidence supplied by the silence of the above-mentioned writers, and the high improbability that, at the period of the Virgin's death, the early Christians should have had it in their power to pay this magnificent tribute of veneration for her memory. Pococke, upon the authority of authors

* Clarke's Travels, 8vo. vol. iv. chap. 8. p. 368. † Chateaubriand says: "Though Mary did not die at Jeru. salem, yet, according to the opinion of several of the fathers, she was miraculously buried at Gethsemane by the apostles. Enthywhom he has not named, thinks it probable that it was the sepulchre of Melisendis, queen of Jerusalem. You descend to it by a flight of fifty (Maundrell says forty-seven) marble steps, each step twenty feet wide: these are conjectured by Dr. Clarke to be of less high antiquity than the sepulchre itself, which is the largest of all the cryptæ or caves near Jerusalem, and no era can be with any certainty fixed upon as the date of its construction. " It ranks," he remarks,

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among those colossal works which were accomplished by the inhabitants of Asia Minor, of Phenicia, and of Palestine, in the first ages; works which differ from those of Greece, in displaying less of beauty, but more of arduous enterprise; works which remind us of the people, rather than of the artist; which we refer to as monuments of history, rather than of taste." Appropriate chapels within this same cave, distinguish the supposed tombs of Anna, Joachim, and Joseph also. In that of the Virgin, the different Christian sects have each their altar, and even the Turks have an oratory here.

Proceeding along the valley, at the foot of Mount Olivet is the garden of Gethsemane; an even plat of ground, says Maundrell, not above 57 yards square, where are shewn some old olive trees, supposed to identify the spot to which our Lord was wont to resort. (John xviii. 1, 2.) To the south of this spot, in the rocks on the eastern side, are what are called the sepulchres of the Patriarchs: these are four in number, and are severally distinguished as the se

mius relates the history of this marvellous funeral. St. Thomas having caused the coffin to be opened, nothing was found in it but a virgin robe, the simple and mean garment of that queen of glory, whom the angels had conveyed to heaven." !!! The identity of the sepulchre may be judged of by the legend.

pulchre of Jehoshaphat, of Absalom, of St. James, and of Zachariah. In those of Absalom and Zachariah, the rock has been cut away so as to form an area, in the centre of which appears a monument of prodigious size, seeming to consist of a single stone, although standing as if erected by an architect, and adorned with columns appearing to support the edifice, of which they are in fact integral parts; the whole of each mausoleum being of one mass of stone, hewn, and not built. The ornaments of Absalona's sepulchre consist of twenty-four semi-columns of the Doric order, not fluted; six on each front of the monument, which stands about fifteen feet from the rock out of which it has been hewn. "On the capital is the frieze, with the triglyph; and above the frieze rises a socle, which supports a triangular pyramid, too lofty for the total height of the tomb. The pyramid is not of the same piece as the rest of the monument." There is a room cut out of the rock in Absalom's pillar, considerably above the level of the ground on the outside. In the sides of this room are niches, apparently designed to receive corpses or coffins. It is an extraordinary circumstance, that to these two sepulchres there is at present no perceptible entrance: the only way of gaining admittance into the interior of that of Absalom, is through a hole recently broken for the purpose; to that of Zachariah there is none. Pococke conjectures, that if the former served as a sepulchre, there might originally have been some under-ground entrance, now closed up" as I was informed," he adds, "there is to the tomb of Zachariah, which, they say, is known to the Jews, and that they privately carry their dead to it." This latter sepulchre is described by Chateaubriand as terminating

• Chateaubriand, vol. ii. p. 100. † Pococke, book i. chap. 6.

in a point bending a little back, like the Phrygian caps, or a Chinese monument. The sepulchre of Jehoshaphat is a grot, the door of which, in a very good style, is its principal ornament. Over this are sepulchres of the Jews. The cave of St. James has a handsome portico of four columns, which do not rest upon the ground, but are placed at a certain height in the rock, in the same manner as the colonnade of the Louvre rises from the first story of the palace.

It has never been determined when or by what people these sepulchres were hewn. They are described by Dr. Clarke as a continuation of one vast cemetery, extending along the base of the mountainous elevations which surround Jerusalem on its southern and eastern sides; and which, independently of every other consideration, would indicate the former existence of a numerous, flourishing, and powerful people. To relate the legends of the monks respecting them, would, he remarks, be worse than silence. Even Chateaubriand admits that their architecture contradicts the tradition, and proves that they cannot date so far back as the earliest period of Jewish antiquity. "If I were required," he says, " to fix precisely the age in which these mausoleums were erected, I should place it about the time of the alliance between the Jews and the Lacedemonians, under the first Maccabees. The Doric order was still prevalent in Greece; the Corinthian did not supplant it till half a century later, when the Romans began to overrun Peloponnesus and Asia. In naturalising at Jerusalem the architecture of Corinth and Athens," he adds, "the Jews intermixed it with the forms of their peculiar style. The tombs in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and the sepulchres of the kings (north of the city), display a manifest alliance of the Egyptian and Grecian taste :