adorned with flowers, branches, and fillets, designed to be offered as a thank-offering on the morrow. Then came the prisoners in fetters, and the huge elephants which had been taken from the Syrians. Each of these animals bore a wooden tower upon his shoulders, in which were thirty-two warriors, besides the Ethiopian who guided him *.

"After these came the high-priest with the Sanhedrim, the priests, the Levites, and the temple-music. The two sons of Hyrcanus, on their car, formed the centre of the procession, and after them came the military music of flutes, horns, aduffes, and trumpets. The army itself followed, adorned with branches of laurel and palm. First came the heavy-armed infantry, with shields and lances, in companies of hundreds and thousands. They had no upper garment, and their under garment, which was girt up short, was of various form and colour, as the fancy of each individual dictated; but all had a sword hanging at their girdle; their feet and arms were protected by metal greaves and arm-pieces, the body was covered with a coat of mail, the head with a helmet, and over the back hung the large shield. The light-armed infantry followed in like manner, but with less cumbrous defensive weapons, and slings, bows, and darts for offence. The cavalry were few in number, and lightly armed; the Jewish state had never maintained any large force of this description. The military engines followed, of which the Israelites had learnt the use from the Phoenicians and Syrians ; catapults, bows which were bent by machinery, and threw beams of wood to a great distance; balista, levers with one arm which hurled masses of stone of many hundred weight into a fortress; battering rams, consisting of the trunks of trees, armed at the extremity with an iron head of a ram, swung in chains, which were set in motion by warriors who stood beneath a moveable pent-house, and thus driven with great force against the walls. The people, crowding behind, closed the whole procession. When they arrived at the castle of Baris, the youthful warriors entered their father's palace, and the army dispersed itself through the city." Vol. II. p. 55.

Helon becomes a priest, and this circumstance enables the author to describe, (which he does in detail,) the nature of the sacerdotal office. The pilgrim also marries, and the betrothment and the nuptials are described. All the forms regarding these matters shew that the author has read with attention Michaelis's great work on the Mosaic law; but he has not studied with equal care the character of the Asiatics. Helon makes love, not in the burning phrase of oriental passion, but in the measured and didactic language of the synagogue.

Myron is again introduced on the scene, and instead of being the harbinger of joy, he is introduced with the laws regarding the Goel, or blood-avenger, and the Jewish practice of purga

"1 Maccabees, vi. 37.

tion from a charge of adultery. All this is rather clumsily managed; but our writers of Voyages Imaginaires invariably fail in the conduct of their machinery. We shall instance only the case of the Goel. Myron is made to pull the beard of our old friend Elisama, who in his wrath aims a blow at him, which kills another person, and the homicide is obliged to fly to a city of refuge. Now it is impossible for a stranger to be in the East for a single day, without discovering that the Asiatic point of honour is the beard. An oriental swears by his beard. As Walton fancies that every good angler is a good man, so when a Syrian commits a crime, it is not spoken of as an offence. against the laws, but an offence against his beard; and how such a beard is to be pitied' is the cry through the town. One man asks another after the state of his beard, and a fine beard is a certain passport to respect. It was therefore not in good keeping for our author to represent a polite Greek as guilty of a breach of decorum, worthy only of an idiot or a barbarian.

In describing the circumstances regarding the Goel, our author has neglected a fair occasion of contrasting Moses and Mohammed as law-givers. The matter very forcibly strikes the mind here; for the right of a man to revenge his kinsman's death existed among the Jews and Arabs in such inveteracy of habit, that no legislator could, with any prospect of success, endeavour to eradicate it. Modification could alone be thought of. Now let us mark the conduct of the two law-givers, only premising that the Arab, and the great Jewish legislator, much resembled each other in the general circumstances of their public influence, and of the surrounding society. Mohammed undoubtedly endeavours to mitigate the horrid custom; and, acknowledging the right of the Goel, or blood-avenger, he recommends him to accept a sum of money in lieu of gratifying his passion. Moses commands a judicial enquiry always to precede the exercise of the Goel's privilege; and in case of man-slaughter, the unfortunate homicide was permitted to dwell in a city called a city of refuge. The law of the Arabian prophet has never been observed, for it militated against all the Asiatic notions of high honour. The institution of Moses, on the contrary, was always in use while the Jews were in Palestine, for it was the best compromise which the passions of his people allowed him to make between public justice and private revenge. All that the public law gave up was the mere form of executing the murderer; his doom was a matter of judicial sentence, and not of individual wrath; and thus no man was put to death without cause, while the mere accidental slayer of his kind was in all circumstances protected.

After opportunities have been found for interesting views of the Essenes, and other features of Jewish life, our pilgrim proposes to return to Egypt, sets sail with his wife and friends from Jaffa, but, to our astonishment, the author wrecks the ship, and all on board perish. Helon is the last of the survivors, and he is made to exclaim, amidst the uproar of the elements,

"The angel of the Covenant

"Behold he cometh, saith Jehovah of Hosts,"

and is buried in the waters.

We shall add no tears to the waters which cover this unnecessary extinction. But these volumes have merit independently of the romance; they exhibit extensive research, thrown not unfrequently into an attractive shape. They may make a good introduction to more learned works, and exhibit a pleasing and faithful picture of some of the striking features in the Jewish character. The work is not dull, like Jennings, nor tedious like Michaelis. Simple references to passages in Scripture would have been sufficient, and the space now occupied by extracts might have been filled with those many interesting minutiæ of manners, dress, and other subjects, which throw a light and graceful colouring over the gravity of instruction; and the translator, instead of copying what he rather ambitiously calls Notes and Illustrations from Clark, Burckhardt, and half a dozen other moderns, ought to have read the stores of Rabbinical learning in the notes to Wetstein's Greek Testament, he then would have been enabled to have illustrated his author from sources equally curious, copious, and original.

The Modern Traveller, or Popular Description-Geographical, Historical, and Topographical, of the various countries of the Globe.— In Monthly Numbers. 12mo. London. Duncan.

THIS is a very ingenious and useful work, apparently designed by its size and simplicity for the young, but from its extent of information, and accuracy of statement, perfectly fitted to be of value to the intelligent of every time of life. This is the age of travel, and much of the most popular and interesting reading of the country is now furnished by travellers. But as no individual, whatever his spirit of adventure may be, can pervade

6

every region, nor whatever may be his perspicacity, can see correctly all that he sees, it is palpable that error and inadequacy of knowledge must be the frequent result of adhering to the exclusive statements of even the most accomplished wanderers over this particoloured world.

The present publication undertakes to obviate this formidable inconvenience. With a large command of materials, for it evidently draws from all authentic sources, and with no observable partiality for distinguished names, it compares and combines the solid knowledge of the whole, corrects the obliquities of one by the directness of another, and, as the result, tells us all that is actually known of the country in question.

The fashion of the day is, we all know, much in matters of travel: and until the fashion be tired out, our natural human curiosity must be content, malgre, to be satiated and suffer under the same heavy repletion. During the war, while France and its dependencies were shut upon us, our tourists were driven in despair to the north, and for ten long years the public was vexed with eternal hyperboreanism; Quartos came home loaded with Cossacks, and Calmucks, Dniepers, and Czars; savages of every approximation to the brute, and snows in every month of the year. France at length gave way, and through her crumbling gates rolled in the whole swarm of London penmanship; the unhappy consequence was to be foreseen. For a period, long in the history of suffering literature, volumes of every size and thickness, inundated the native table, with palais royals, Tuilleries, coffee-houses, and cookery. Waterloo came, and turned the tide at once of French fortune and of British authorship. Every master of his personal liberty and ten pounds, rushed to the sacred soil of Belgic battle, and taught the press to groan under brigades, bivouacs, and Buonaparte. All that Saracen or Christian knew of war's vast art, was to these Cockneys known; nay some had the hardihood to venture via Quatre Bras as far as Paris, and the relentless cruelty to gorge us again with the Palais Royal and the patès of the "Illustrious Very."

What resource was there in those times for an honest English gentleman who wished to know, whether the South Americans had devoured the Spaniards, or been converted by them to Ferdinand and the holy inquisition; whether Greece had returned to her ancient privileges of being kicked by the sacred green slipper of every Turk high and low who condescended to plunder her of her paras; or simply whether "stood Egypt where she did."

Unhappily, when the stream of travel flowed on those coun

tries, it flowed in a torrent, leaving its old channels utterly dry. Greece and Egypt, Constantinople, and the Crimea, meagre resistance, cowardly attack, paltry politics, and the pacha of three tails who in honour of barbarism, sits on the throne of the Ptolemies, are the only importations of the present period, that "have increased, are increasing, and ought to be diminished;" but with which the Greek committee and the pernicious invention of steam-boats, threaten us with a long and melancholy superfluity.

Under such circumstances, we know few literary services more valuable than that one by which the whole actual state of European society should be kept fairly and fully open to the general eye; by which all that was true should be secured, and all that was partial, or erroneous, all that was mere repetition or personal ignorance, should be sifted away. The present publication seems to do this to a very meritorious extent, and we hope to see the publisher, who has had the spirit and good sense to undertake such a work, amply sustained by the public patronage.

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The Modern Traveller" is published in monthly parts at a trivial expense, two parts making a volume, of which three have already appeared on the interesting subjects of the Holy Land, Syria, and Asia Minor,

The Life and Remains of the Rev. Edward Daniel Clarke, LL.D, Professor of Mineralogy in the University of Cambridge. 4to. London. G. COWIE and Co. 1824.

DR. CLARKE was a man of considerable industry, intelligence, and enterprize: too vigorous and bustling to be satisfied with the rather heavy ease of an University life, but too desultory and capricious in his pursuits to make any important or permanent contribution to general knowledge.

He was the descendant of a literary race, his great-grandfather having been Wotton the antagonist of Bentley, and his grandfather and father both clergymen, and both having written something popular in its day.

Dr. Clarke was born in 1769, at Willingdon in Sussex. His early years passed away without affording any indications of his future temperament. His Biographer thinks that he has detected natural history among his early passions. But all