but hopeless longing. Here not a temple, nor a theatre, nor a house, but a whole city, rises before us, untouched, unaltered, the very same as it was eighteen hundred years ago, when inhabited by Romans. We range through the same streets; tread the very same pavement; behold the same walls; enter the same doors; and repose in the same apartments. We are surrounded by the same objects; and out of the same windows we contemplate the same scenery. In the midst of all this not a voice is heard; not even the sound of a foot, to disturb the loneliness of the place, or to interrupt his reflections. All around is silence; not the silence of solitude and repose, but of death and devastation; the silence of a great city without one single inhabitant: "Horror ubique animos, simul ipsa silentia terrent." The streets are paved with lava; the houses are richly inlaid with Roman and Mosaic pavements; and even the names of their ancient inhabitants still remain inscribed over the doors. VI. Little more than a few huts, rising among ruins, denote the splendour of ancient SARDIS 2; and URJEUSH is now lost in dust3; though it was once the capital of the kingdom of Karasm. In the year 1221 1 Virg. En. book ii. Eustace, vol. iii. p. 57. 8vo. 3 The sands of the Lybian Desarts, driven by the west winds, have left no lands capable of tillage on any parts of the western banks of the Nile, not sheltered by mountains. The encroachment of these sands on soils, which were formerly inhabited and cultivated, is evidently seen. M. the Mungols put one hundred thousand of its inhabitants to the sword'; and in 1388 Tamerlane' caused it to be razed; and the land, on which it stood, to be sowed with barley. DAMASCUS is the oldest city in the world, that bears its original name. It was in existence in the time of Abraham; and Josephus says it was built by Uz, the son of Shem, the grandson of Noah. It still retains much of its ancient beauty. The ancient splendour of LAMBESE, however, is attested only by its Corinthian pillars; its amphitheatre; and its temple of the Ionic order. Who, in the village of Balbait, would recognize the city of BUSIRIS? Its ruins, proud as they are, and exhibiting exquisite specimens of beauty, as they do, are but faint outlines of its celebrated temple. VII. TYRE, of "perfect beauty,' "3 whose merchants were princes, and styled " the honourable of the M. Denon informs us in the account of his travels in Lower and Upper Egypt, that summits of the ruins of ancient cities, buried under these sands, still appear externally; and that, but for a ridge of mountains, called the Lybian chain, which borders the left bank of the Nile, and forms, in the parts where it rises, a barrier against the invasion of these sands, the shores of the river, on that side, would long since have ceased to be habitable. Nothing can be more melancholy, says this traveller, than to walk over villages, swallowed up by the sand of the desert, to trample underfoot their roofs, to strike against the summits of their minarets, to reflect, that yonder were cultivated fields, that there grew trees, that here were even the dwellings of men, and that all has vanished."-De Luc, Mercure de France, Sept. 1807.-Jameson. La Croix, Hist. Genghis Khân, p. 256. 2 Hist. Timur Bek, vol, i p. 306. 3 Ezekiel, ch. xxvii. v. 3. 4 Their ships were frequently of cedar; the benches of ivory; fine em earth," once the emporium of the East and a mart for the West, is now a rock for fishermen to dry their nets upon!-Such is its condition, and such was the prophesy of Ezekiel.2—In a similar state of decay is SIDON, the most ancient of maritime cities; illustrious for its wealth; for the sobriety and industry of its inhabitants; for the wisdom of its councils; and for its skill in commerce, geography, and astronomy. Who can trace the power and splendour of ancient CARTHAGE, once, as Strabo informs us, forty miles in circumference, and which took seventeen days in burning, in the small village of Melcha?Not a column of porphyry or of granite remains. SYRACUSE, at one time manning powerful fleets, and raising large armies within its walls, is little more than an extensive heap of ruins and rubbish.-Where, too, is the city of MEMPHIS?-Etiam periere ruinæ. -No three travellers agree as to the place on which it stood while a solitary obelisk alone, overlooks the fragments once belonging to the Egyptian HELIOPOLIS, Fragments, attesting, with most Egyptian ruins, a people, who loved peace so well, that they kept armies only for their defence; whose learning and arts brought even Greece for a pupil; and whose empire, says Bossuet,3 had a character, distinct from every other. embroidered linens of Egypt was used for sails ;-and their canopies were of scarlet and purple silk.-Ezekiel, ch. xxvii. 1 Isaiah, ch. xxiii. v. 8. 2 Ezekiel, ch. xxvi. v. 5, 14. 3 Univ. Hist. part iii. Progression of Empires. EPHESUS, called in ancient times "the most illustrious;" a city once possessing a temple, adorned by Scopas and Praxiteles, and boasting of pillars, formed by the manual labour of kings, is now become the habitation of a few herdsmen and shepherds, who find a shelter from the inclemency of the weather, beneath its mighty masses of crumbling walls-awful and affecting monuments of sublunary grandeur!-BALBEC has long been employed as a miserable receptacle for a few poor, whò cultivate maize, water-melons and cotton. There is not a column of marble among its fragments, that does not tell a melancholy history. They present the boldest plan ever exhibited in architecture.'-The hundred gates of THEBES?? awful and magnificent 2 Vide Ruins of Heliopolis. London, 1757, p. 6, fol. << Very imperfect ideas can be formed of the extensive ruins of Thebes, even from the accounts of the most skilful and accurate travellers. It is absolutely impossible to imagine the scene displayed, without seeing it. The most sublime ideas, that can be formed from the most magnificent specimens of our present architecture, would give a very incorrect picture of these ruins; for such is the difference, not only in magnitude, but in form, proportion, and construction, that even the pencil can convey but a faint idea of the whole. It appeared to me like entering a city of giants, who, after a long conflict, were all destroyed, leaving the ruins of their various temples, as the only proofs of their former existence. The temple of Luxor presents to the traveller, at once, one of the most splendid groups of Egyptian grandeur. If his attention be attracted to the north side of Thebes by the towering remains, that project to a great height above the wood of palmtrees, he will gradually enter that forest-like assemblage of ruins of temples, columns, obelisks, colossi, sphynxes, portals, and an endless number of other astonishing objects, that will convince him at once i of -- are they in their ruins!-PERSEPOLIS ?-Its majestic pillars attest its pristine splendour; its fragments afford innumerable nests and dens for beasts and birds of prey, for toads and serpents, and other noxious reptiles. When a learned orientalist, now living, first beheld these ruins, he assured me, he was for some time unable to speak The "proud NINEVEH,"" and the "Golden BABYLON," the most populous and most magnificent cities, that ever adorned the earth, retain not even a stone to tell the melancholy history of their fate!-Babylon," the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of Chaldees, shall never be inhabited, nor shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation.— The Arabian shall not pitch his tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their folds there; but wild beasts of the desert shall be there; and their dens shall be full of doleful creatures."-Babylon, built by of the impossibility of a description. On the west side of the Nile, still the traveller finds himself among the wonders. The temples of Gournon, Memnonium, and Medinet Aboo, attest the extent of the great city on this side. The unrivalled colossal figures in the plains of Thebes, the number of tombs excavated in the rocks, those in the great valley of the kings, with their paintings, mummies, sarcophagi, figures, &c. are all objects, worthy of the admiration of the traveller; who will not fail to wonder how a nation, which was once so great as to erect these stupendous edifices, could so far fall into oblivion, that even their language and writing are totally unknown to us."-Belzoni's Narrative, p. 37, 38. : "He will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness : and flocks shall lie down in the midst of her; all the beasts of the nations."-Zephaniah, ch. ii. v. 12, 13. 2 Isaiah, ch. xiii. v. 19, &c. |