Rhipsime was a virgin of exquisite beauty. Accompanied by a band of maidens, she had fled from Rome to escape the addresses of the reigning emperor, whom, as a pagan, she could not espouse. Tiridates was equally smitten by her charms, and when she refused him for the same reason, he put her to death with hideous tortures, and killed at the same time her nurse Caiana.

The other sights of the place I have described as fully as a modern reader's patience is likely to bear, and will therefore say nothing of the cuneiform inscription, nor of the bell which bears, in Tibetan, the Buddhist formula ôm ôm hrum, nor of the famous fruit garden. The most really interesting thing in the convent is the library, mean as its appearance is; but people ignorant as we were of Armenian and other Eastern tongues could of course make nothing of it. I cannot but hope that, with the progress of education, there may arise native Armenian scholars who will examine its treasures more thoroughly than any one appears to have as yet done.

The present condition of the monks leaves much to be desired, as far as knowledge and education goes, but in general their monastic life will fairly bear a comparison with that of most Western as well as Russian foundations. It is not squalid; nor is it, according to monastic ideas, rigid, for though they fast a good Ideal, they do not mortify the flesh otherwise, and have quite shocked Roman Catholic travellers by enforcing no rule of silence. It is enlivened by the visits of prelates and pilgrims from a distance, and

now by the existence of the school, which might justify to a reforming eye the retention of the monastic estates, though it is happily needless to fear reforming eyes or hands in these lands of long repose. As no one seemed to speak any tongue but Armenian and Tatar, or in some few cases Russian, our communications with them were very limited. Their dress is becoming it consists of a long black robe of a thin serge or tissue, not so thin as crape, and a peaked cap, from which a sort of veil of the same material falls back over the neck and shoulders. On the whole they impress a traveller perhaps more favourably than the inmates of convents generally do; inferior as they are in learning and polish to the brethren of that famous Western foundation, the mother of all Western monastic houses and the home of their founder, which is perhaps the chief rival of Etchmiadzin in antiquity and historical fame-the great Benedictine abbey of

Monte Casino.

Unfortunately the situation of Etchimiadzin is by no means healthy, placed as it is in an excessively hot plain, on the banks of a stream which, being diverted into a number of channels for the purpose of irrigation, loses itself in fever-producing marshes. Except in the large convent garden just outside the walls, which borders the magnificent stone-faced fishpond, or reservoir, formed by a late patriarch, there are no trees anywhere near; the landscape is bare and open all the way from the glens of Ala Göz and the brown mountains of the Karabagh in the east to the hills of Kars, far on the western horizon.

The glory of the place is its view of Ararat, which rises full in front in indescribable majesty, covered on this side with snow for a good way down. We could not take our eyes off it all the time we remained. Doubtless the neighbourhood of the holy mountain adds sensibly to the veneration which the oldest seat of their faith and the storehouse of so many relics commands from all pious or patriotic Armenians.

The Armenians are an extraordinary people, with a tenacity of natural life scarcely inferior to that of the Jews, and perhaps more remarkable, since it has not been forced upon them by such unremitting persecution. They have been a nation known by their present name ever since the days of Herodotus1 at least, and probably a good deal earlier.2 Under the Persian empire they seem to have retained their own princes, merely paying tribute to the Great King, and marching in his armies, as they did under Xerxes against Greece. That the same sort of arrangement lasted on in the days of the Seleucid kings may be conjectured from the fact that Artaxias and Zadrates, under whom Armenia recovered her independence, are described as being not only descendants of the

1 Herodotus speaks of them as living on the Upper Euphrates, but conceives of the Saspeires as occupying the eastern part of what we should call Armenia, placing the latter between the Medes and the Colchians. Perhaps his Saspeires are the Iberians.

The kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz of the Bible, the Armenian kingdom of Xenophon's Tigranes, the lover of Panthea, were probably within the compass of what we call Armenia, though the former cannot be placed there with absolute certainty, and we never know how far anything in the Cyropaedia' can be taken as historical.

royal house but also generals or lieutenants of Antiochus the Great. Not very long afterwards Digran, whom the Greek and Roman writers call Tigranes, threw off the suzerainty of the Parthian Arsacidæ, who had become the chief power of Western Asia, and made Armenia the centre of an empire which stretched from the Orontes to the Caspian. As he had supported his father-in-law, Mithridates of Pontus, against the Romans, he was attacked and his power shattered by Lucullus, who penetrated to the capital of Artaxata, at the north-east foot of Ararat. None of his successors was able to raise the kingdom to the same pitch; they maintained, however, a sort of unstable independence, playing off first the Parthians and then the Persian Sassanids against the Romans, and the Romans against the Parthians and Persians. From the time of Nero, who placed a native sovereign of the Arsacid family on the throne, they had generally rather leant on their Western neighbours. Shapur, the second of the Sassanid kings, conquered Armenia at the time when he defeated and took prisoner the unfortunate Emperor Valerian. Under Diocletian it was recovered for Rome, and Tiridates the Great (of course not the Tiridates for whose fears Horace did not care, who was a Parthian, three centuries earlier) returned to the throne of his ancestors. The conversion of this Tiridates by his cousin, St. Gregory the Enlightener, whom he had confined

Horace, Od. i. 26, 5. One can fancy Roman quidnuncs talking about the alarms of Tiridates much as ours do about the Khan of Khiva or Yakub Beg of Kashgar.

for fourteen years in a dry well, is the turning-point in the history of the nation.

From that day Armenia became the bulwark of Christianity in Asia. Overrun and ravaged by the Persian fire-worshippers, the first race or faith that set the example of religious intolerance and persecution, who at last extinguished the Arsacid kingdom about the year 440 A.D.; then, after the fall of the Persian power, by the Mohammedan khalifs of Bagdad; sometimes supported, sometimes abandoned by the Byzantine emperors, and torn all the while by internal dissensions and revolutions, she rose in the ninth century to be again a state of some importance in the world. The first flood of Arab conquest had subsided; the Roman emperors had even recovered lost territory; the Abbasside sovereigns had seen their dominions seized by a swarm of local potentates. Armenia was now ruled by the dynasty of the Bagratians, a family who claim to be descended from King David the Psalmist, and who may very possibly be really of Hebrew origin. Their capital was Ani, between Etchmiadzin and Kars, the magnificent ruins of whose churches and palaces remain to attest the transitory splendour and wealth of the kingdom they ruled. This Bagratid race gave a line of kings to Georgia, while some of its branches established themselves in Mingrelia and Imeritia. The family still exists, and ranks high among the nobility of Russia; one of them was the Prince Bagration, who was killed at Borodino in the Napoleonic campaign of 1812.