as they were from silly legends), than the deep cavern, with a long flight of steps, in the floor of which a grave was hewn, and which was designated by the Arab show-woman, the tomb of Lazarus.* The village itself is now called Lazarieh (as I heard distinctly from four different Arabs), and the Moslems have made a saint of him who was restored to life, and have built a small mosque in his honour. Some shapeless ruins of no particular age or style (a very common sort of ruin in Palestine), are supposed to be the remains of a church built here by Melisinda, a queen of Jerusalem, in the twelfth century, and since converted into a mosque and a stable successively. If the sight of those poor hovels, evidently rebuilt from the fragments of an old place, does not convince you that Lazarieh has nothing of old Bethany but its site, and a few of its stones, you may of course find (on a proper application to your guide), the houses of Simon the leper, and of Martha, and Mary, which you may have the privilege of examining (under consent of your nose) for a very moderate consideration.† Ah! it is as bad as a

* It cannot well be the genuine tomb, as it is in the village, and on the wrong part of it for the scripture narrative.

"They go so far as to show a great stone to some, as the

curse on the land, this inventing of Bible scenes; as its very barrenness: it angers reason till she almost (being duped and mocked so often) refuses to believe any thing identified with place; it forces the Christian into constant argument, the educated man of the world into infidelity, and the ignorant into a blind superstition, which leads at last to the senseless declaration "Credo quia impossibile." From Bethany, one feature of the landscape struck me, and this was the beautiful effect of the mountain of Moab over the Dead Sea, and the valley of the Jordan, blue from the cause I have already named; and I could not but reflect that, as the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, and of Lot's wife, had so often formed an illustration to the Redeemer's discourses, this view of the scene where those transactions were enacted (ever before his eyes when walking to Bethany) may have suggested them as meet examples of God's punishment of sin, and the fatal effects of looking backward in the pursuit of duty. Although I many times passed on the paths from Jerusalem to Bethany, and twice encircled the Mount of Olives, and

ass on which our Lord sat when he entered Jerusalem, converted miraculously into stone; but I was not so favoured." - Lowthion's Tour in Palestine, p. 73.

went as far to the eastward of the road as the nature of the ground would permit, yet I never saw any traces of other ruins which could give even a colour to the existence, in former times, of a village. The position of Bethphage, therefore, if it were a distinct place, is rather puzzling. There are a few traces of building, and a single column immediately above the present Lazarieh, seemingly a continuation for a short distance of the ancient Bethany. But it is possible that one part of Lazarieh may have been sufficiently distinct from the other to have made two small villages such as the Scripture mentions. It generally took me three quarters of an hour, and sometimes more, to reach on horseback the modern village from the Damascus Gate.

CHAP. XII.

TOMBS.

THE tombs in the valley of Jehoshaphat over against Mount Moriah have been already alluded to; but I must not omit to mention several sepulchral caverns in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, which I met with during my numerous rides about that highly interesting vicinage. First, in celebrity as in beauty, is undoubtedly that collection of chambers, just eastward of the road to Damascus, and called commonly “The Tombs of the Kings." Robinson has proved plainly* that this is the tomb of Helena, Queen

* Mr. Williams objects to this, that the pillars or pyramids and the remarkable dome are here no longer, and that there are too many tombs in it for Helena. As the monuments of the Fuller, of Ananias, of Absalom, and of Rachel are destroyed or invisible, the pyramids might well vanish also. Pausanias' account of the door seems to me to seal its absurdity; and we need more information before we can assert that Helena made the tomb only for her own body. And it is not quite fair to refer the plural of Josephus to the pyramids, and the singular of Pausanias to the chambers.

of Adiabene*; and as Josephus has given us data by which we learn that this Helena died not long after the famine at Jerusalem†, which came to pass in the reign of Claudius Cæsar (about A.D. 45), we arrive at the knowledge of the style of tomb building in the time of Claudius or Nero. Three pyramids, pillars, or cippi‡, ornamented this sepulchre, but of these no trace remains. They were probably much like the upper parts of the two outward tombs in the valley of Jehoshaphat, and the resemblance between the carving of the eastern doorway of Helena's tomb, and that of those in the valley, is very striking, although the workmanship of the former is apparently superior. A low door, in a sort of open portico cut in the solid rock, leads you into a succession of dark chambers where a light is needful; out of these are again small cells for the reception of a body in each,

If Helena shared the tomb with her son by accident, how could it have accommodated him if she had made it only a single excavation; and if it were enlarged for him, is it not likely that at the same time room would be made for such of his forty-eight children (Josephus, Wars, xx. v. 3.) as should wish to lie in the sepulchre of their father and grandmother?

* Robinson, vol. i. p. 534.

† Josephus, Antiquit. xx. c. ii. s. 1., and c. iv. s. 3. Acts, xi. 28.