(God forbid)," piously ejaculated the Pasha; "that is the sacred emblem of which true believers speak with reverence, and not the handiwork of Infidels." "There is no Infidel living," exclaimed the engineer, who was looked up to as an authority on these subjects, "either in Frangistan or in Yenghi Dunia (America), who could make anything like that; they are the work of the Majus (Magi), and are to be sent to England to form the gateway to the palace of the Queen." "May God curse all Infidels and their works!" observed the Cadi's deputy, who accompanied the Pasha; "what comes from their hands is of Satan; it has pleased the Almighty to let them be more powerful and ingenious than the true believers in this world, that their punishment and the reward of the faithful may be greater in the next." LAYARD'S NINEVEH.

ASSOCIATIONS OF JERUSALEM.

How memorable are the associations which rise to the mind of the Christian at the very name of Jerusalem! Within its walls David, the psalmist, the sweet singer of Israel, composed the songs still sung in every Christian land. There Solomon built and dedicated that first temple, within whose holy place the Most High condescended to manifest his presence. There Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and nearly all the prophets and mighty men of Old Testament history dwelt, triumphed, or suffered. There, at length, in the fulness of time, the angel of God appeared to the high priest Zacharias, and announced to him that he should have a son, who should be the forerunner of our Great High Priest, the long-expected Messiah. Within its temple the Holy Child first manifested his Divine wisdom, disputing with the doctors. Within its streets his most mighty acts were performed; and in an upper chamber there, that solemn sacramental rite was instituted, which Christians of every succeeding age have practised in obedience to his commandment, and in remembrance of his dying love; and, finally, Jerusalem is the city over which Jesus wept, as he exclaimed, "O Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!"

But not less distinguished in her overthrow than in all other respects is the glorious but doomed city of Zion, in that her destruction was the type and prefigurement of the final close of our world's being, when these elements shall melt with fervent heat. "In patience possess your souls," said Christ, addressing his disciples, and forewarning them of the approaching fulfilment of ancient prophecy; "And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judea flee to the mountains; and let them which are in the midst of it depart out: and let not them that are in the countries enter thereinto. For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are written may be fulfilled. But woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days! for there shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people. And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled. And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men's hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud, with power and great glory. And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh."

All that is here foretold of the Jewish capital literally came to pass, and all that was forewarned of its people is being still accomplished. The time of the Gentiles is not yet fulfilled, and Mount Zion, once "beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth," is still trodden down of the Gentiles, after nearly eighteen hundred years have passed over its fallen palaces and walls, whose stones are still dear to the outcast Hebrew.

Immortalized by revolutions more various and destructive than have occurred in any other city of the world, Jerusalem claims a sad pre-eminence in suffering, as once she did in glory. Seventeen times has it been sacked and partially destroyed. It has been the field of the most brilliant exploits of the Jewish, Roman, and Saracen armies, and has

been moistened by the blood of our ancestors during the romantic ages of the Crusades.

RUINS OF SACRED AND HISTORIC LANDS.

DESTRUCTION OF JERUSALEM.

Dr. Keith, in pointing out the exact fulfilment of every tittle of ancient prophecy in this awful overthrow, after referring to the horrors of the famished within the walls-too horrible to read-thus depicts the final scene :-" Sixty thousand Roman soldiers unremittingly besieged them; they encompassed Jerusalem with a wall, and hemmed them in on every side; they brought down their high and fenced walls to the ground; they slaughtered the slaughterers, they spared not the people; they burned the temple in defiance of the commands, the threats, and the resistance of their general. With it the last hope of all the Jews was extinguished. They raised, at the sight, an universal but an expiring cry of sorrow and despair. Ten thousand were there slain, and six thousand victims were enveloped in its blaze. The whole city, full of the famished dying, and of the murdered dead, presented no picture but that of despair, no scene but of horror. The aqueducts and the city sewers were crowded as the last refuge of the hopeless. Two thousand were found dead there, and many were dragged from thence and slain. The Roman soldiers put all indiscriminately to death, and ceased not till they became faint and weary and overpowered with the work of destruction. But they only sheathed the sword to light the torch. They set fire to the city in various places. The flames spread everywhere, and were checked but for a moment by the red streamlets in every street. Jerusalem became heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest. Within the circuit of a few miles, in the space of five months,-foes and famine, pillage and pestilence within-a triple wall around, and besieged every moment from without,-eleven hundred thousand human beings perished, and the tale of each of them was a tragedy. Was there ever so concentrated a mass of misery? Could any prophecy be more faithfully and awfully fulfilled? The prospect of his own crucifixion, when Jesus was on his way to Calvary, was not more clearly before him, and seemed to affect him less, than the fate of Jerusalem. How full of

tenderness, and fraught with truth, was the sympathetic response of the condoling sufferer to the wailings and lamentations of the women who followed him, when he turned unto them and beheld the city, which some of them might yet see wrapt in flames and drenched in blood, and said, ' Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For behold the days are coming, in which they will say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.'

Babylon, Nineveh, and the mighty cities of Assyria, are all buried under their heaps, but Jerusalem lives on, reserved for other and brighter days. She, too, it may be, holds buried treasures that shall yet be disinterred, to add new evidence to all that has been already yielded, though "Titus commanded the whole city and temple to be razed from the foundation. The soldiers were not then disobedient to their general. Avarice combined with duty and resentment: the altar, the temple, the walls, and the city were overthrown from the base, in search of the treasure which the Jews, beset on every hand by plunderers, had concealed and buried during the siege. Three towers and the remnant of a wall alone stood, the monument and memorial of Jerusalem; and the city was afterwards ploughed over by Terentius Rufus.”

The Roman ploughshare tore up the very foundations of the temple, leaving no longer one stone upon another, and the triumphal arch of Titus, erected at Rome in commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem, still stands in evidence of the captured spoils of the last temple, wherein the desire of all nations had appeared, making the glory of the latter house greater than the former. Sculptured on this memorial of the triumph of Titus, are still seen the Roman soldiers, bearing on their shoulders the seven-branched candlestick, and the holy vessels of the temple. Yet much may, and indeed must, have escaped the search of the Roman treasureseekers; for Jerusalem was made heaps, even as Babylon and Nineveh.

Rome, a younger city than Palestine's ancient capital, bears abundant evidence of the changes wrought on a city set upon hills in the lapse of ages; the ancient remains which now exist have mostly been dug out far beneath the ruins of her modern dwellings; and even since the expulsion of the present Pope from the Roman capital, and its occupa

tion by the soldiers of France, some very remarkable discoveries have been made. But great as the vicissitudes have been to which Rome has been exposed at different periods, they can never stand comparison with those of Jerusalem. The Romans, the Saracens, the Christian Crusaders, and the Turks, have each rebuilt a city of their own on the ancient site, in heedlessness or wilful contempt of all the work of their predecessors; and if, amid the vicissitudes of Roman history, such a total change has taken place on the topography of the seven-hilled city, how vain must it be to imagine that the modern Turkish capital of Syria retains unaltered, after a lapse of eighteen centuries, features which characterized it in the days of the Redeemer.-RUINS.

HERCULANEUM AND POMPEII.

The first re-discovery of Herculaneum occurred in 1713, by the sinking of a well, when several interesting relics were found, and after private explorers had pursued the search for several years, with no great success, the Neapolitan government at length undertook the work, and were rewarded by a magnificent collection of statues, paintings, bronzes, vases, and domestic implements, of all varieties of forms and uses, which now form a very prominent attraction of the Royal Museum at Portici.

The first indications of the site of Pompeii were observed so early as 1689, but it was not till 1755 that any effectual attempts were made to explore its remains. This, it was found, was a much simpler and less difficult process than the attempt to exhume the buried treasures of Herculaneum, as it was not only much less deeply situated, but the loose ashes are removed with little labour. The process of excavation has accordingly been resumed from time to time, till nearly a fourth of the city has been almost entirely cleared from the rubbish, and numerous valuable discoveries have been added to the Royal Neapolitan Museum.

Few works can be conceived more exciting than this exhumation of a buried city. "The upper storeys of the houses," says the author of the elegant little English work on Pompeii, "which appear to have consisted chiefly of wood, were either burned by the red-hot stones ejected from Vesuvius, or broken down by the weight of matter collected on