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.-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, 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, who 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?2 awful and magnificent

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

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, "Belthat even their language and writing are totally unknown to us.' zoni's Narrative, p. 37, 38.

1

"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."-Zephaniahı, ch. ii. v. 12, 13.

2 Isaiah, ch. xiii. v. 19, &c.

Semiramis, was first injured by Cyrus, who, diverting the Euphrates, converted the neighbouring country into a morass.—Darius Hystaspes lowered its walls and demolished its gates: gates formed of brass; and walls so thick, that six chariots could run abreast.1 Then followed the building of Seleucia, and the conflagration of the Parthians. In the time of Pausanias nothing remained but the ruins of its walls and temples. It became a park for those kings of Persia, who succeeded to its ruins, after the Parthian empire was destroyed, to keep their wild beasts in2: in 1173, some ruins of Nebuchadnezzar's palace only remained 3; in the days of Texeira, these were reduced to a few footsteps:-now, even the dust, into which its fragments pulverized, have long been wafted to the Deserts.-Its site has neither name nor remnant.”—The country, round this city, was once a paradise. The soil, says Quintus Curtius, and Niger, was so fruitful, that it produced corn twice a year-and the herdsmen were accustomed to drive

As the walls of Pekin are seventy-five feet high, and so broad, that it is guarded by sentinels on horseback, should'Pekin gradually experience the fate of Thebes, Memphis, and Nineveh, it will present, for a series of ages, a mass of ruins, the most wonderful, that ever the world saw. 2 St. Jerome, Comment. in Isaiæ, cap. 13, 14.

3 Benjamin's de Tudela. Itinerarium, p. 96.

4 Since this was written, Mr. Rich has published two volumes on Babylon. He found the whole face of the country covered with vestiges of buildings, brick walls, and a vast succession of mounds of rubbish : among which is only one tree; which is an evergreen, resembling the lignum vitæ. The ruins commence at Mohawil, nine miles from Hellah, and about thirty-eight miles from Bagdad: and these ruins, he says, are the ruins of the ancient Babylon.

their cattle from pasture, lest they should die of satiety, Strabo asserts, that it was covered with palms; and." as for its millet and wheat," says Herodotus, who travelled thither, "the former grows to the height of a tree, and the latter produces more than two hundred fold. Of all regions, that I have seen," continues he, "this is the most excellent."

VIII.

PALMYRA, once a paradise in the centre of inhospitable deserts, the pride of Solomon, the capital of Zenobia, and the wonder and admiration of all the East, now lies "majestic though in ruins!" Its glory withered, time has cast over it a sacred grandeur, softened into grace. History, by its silence, mourns its melancholy destiny; while immense masses and stupendous columns denote the spot, where once the splendid city of the desert reared her proud and matchless towers, Ruins are the only legacy, the destroyer left to posterity. Beholding, on all sides, a wide and abandoned waste, that loses itself in an interminable horizon, the eye rests on disfigured capitals, entablatures, and pilasters, all of Parian whiteness; which, exhibiting, in various quarters, broken and disjointed skeletons of a city, once the seat of a mighty empire, the imagination luxuriates in a thousand elevated contemplations.-The dream of life assumes a more sublime character;-and, beholding the noblest labours of man, the pride of his heart, and the finest monuments of his genius, lying prostrate and in ruins, desolate and deserted, the mind recog