JANUARY 26th. It being signified to us, at the convent, that the Holy Sepulchre would be open for admission to-day, Mr. Bankes was desirous of visiting it, and I profited also by the same occasion to enter this celebrated monument.

We left the convent at an early hour, and constantly descending till we reached nearly the centre of the city, we arrived in about ten minutes at the low part of the town, in which the church stands. In the large open space before it were at least a hundred

venders of relics, with their little stalls of chaplets, amulets, and crosses of coloured berries and mother-of-pearl, laid out before them; besides other sellers of glass-ware, bracelets, beads, and trinkets, suited to the taste of the various visitors, and equally unobjectionable to purchasers of every faith.

The front of the church presents a singular mixture of eastern and western architecture; but the combination, however contrary to the rigid chastity of taste, produces an agreeable effect. Among the small columns of the front are two of verd-antique, and the aspect of the whole cannot be denied to possess a venerable richness, though it be destitute of regular beauty.

We entered by a large door, now thrown open, and found two Turkish guards, lolling on cushions, and smoking their long pipes, in a recess on our left. To these we were each obliged to pay thirty-three piastres, as the fee of admission demanded from all Europeans who are not furnished with the Sultan's firman. This document exempts the possessor of it from all such charges, but neither of us were thus provided. The Christian subjects of the Porte and European ecclesiastics pay only half this sum, and Mohammedans are admitted gratis whenever they are disposed to enter. The money being once paid, either by pilgrim or resident, ensures his free admission for the whole of the year, on days of public service only. If the door be opened on any other occasion, at the express desire of visitors, the original entrance-fee must be paid over again. The days of opening are regulated by the feasts of the different sects who occupy the church; and they, for the celebration of their stated services, are obliged to pay a fixed sum from their separate and peculiar funds; so that, on the whole, the receipts of the Turks from the devotion of the Christians here, may be estimated to amount to several thousand pounds annually.

A great portion of the church having been destroyed by fire about nine years since, it has been recently restored; and both the architecture and decoration of the interior are said to be much inferior to those of the original edifice. The general plan of the

whole building, and the arrangement of the holy stations which it contains, are, however, so exactly preserved, that the descriptions of the earliest visitors apply as correctly to its present as to its former state. The account which Chateaubriand has given from Deshayes, though written nearly two centuries ago, contains almost every thing that could be said upon the subject, and the few observations of that writer which follow the description referred to, on the style of architecture, &c. appear to be generally just.

The tombs of Godefroy de Bouillon, and of Baudouin, his brother, which drew forth the enthusiastic apostrophe of that writer to the ashes of his heroic countrymen, have been spitefully destroyed by their rivals the Greeks, so that not a vestige of them remains to mark even the spot whereon they stood.

Having visited all the stations, so often enumerated in a hundred books of pilgrimage, from the stone of unction near the entrance, to the top of Calvary on which the cross was elevated, in the regular order of their succession, we remained another hour within to examine more at leisure the different parts of the whole, and to witness the strange scenes that were transacting at one and the same moment, in different parts of the church.

The Corinthian columns of fine marble which formerly adorned the interior, being destroyed by the late fire, the dome is now supported by tall and slender square pillars of masonry, plastered on the outside, and placed so thickly together as to produce the worst effect. The meanness of every thing about the architecture of the central dome, and of the whole rotunda which surrounds the sepulchre itself, can only be exceeded indeed by the wretched taste of its painted decorations. Mr. Bankes observed, that he knew of nothing to which he could aptly compare it, but to a poor and paltry French theatre; and, for myself, the nearest models to which I could liken it, were the painted country-houses of the Turks, in what is called the true Constantinople taste, and which might be light and flowery enough for garden summer-houses, but

is strangely misplaced in a sanctuary of devotion, or in adorning the tomb of the Deity.

Among the inferior objects which attracted our notice, were, first, the capitals of two large pillars, evidently very ancient, and of an order differing from any that we had before seen. These capitals reminded us of the pomegranates and net-work which are enumerated among the ornaments of the Temple. They are now placed on short thick shafts, and serve to support the roof of a grotto, in which the holy cross is said to have been found by St. Helena; the place where she sat to view the workmen employed in the excavation being shown close by. It is by no means improbable but that these capitals belonged originally to some ancient Jewish building, and that they might have been selected from among a heap of other ruins to be applied to their present purpose; but there is not even a tradition regarding their origin.

In another part of the church, we were shown two round holes cut in the rock, and descending to a sort of grotto beneath. One of these holes was considerably larger than the other, and the use made of them is this. The Greek pilgrims, who are sufficiently meagre to try the experiment with some hope of success, go down through the large hole, and come up through the small one, in which, if they succeed, though at the risk of being bruised and losing their skin, they are thought to be in a fit state for heaven, and to be secure of its enjoyment if they happen to grow no fatter.*

-The corpulent friars of Europe seem not to admit this maxim of leanness being a passport to heaven, if one might judge from their pride in a full round belly. Yet Christians are not peculiar in their indulgence of that idea. In the great Mosque of Solomon, according to Père Roger, as cited by Chateaubriand, a similar mode of trial is practised by the devout." Besides the thirty-two columns which sustain the dome, there are two other smaller ones pretty near to the western door, which they show to foreign pilgrims, whom they make to believe, that when they pass freely between these columns, they are predestinated to the paradise of Mohammed; and they say that if a Christian were to pass through these columns, they would assuredly close together and crush him." The pious father, who seems himself to have entered within these forbidden precincts by stealth, slyly remarks, "I know very well, however, to whom that

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After passing these holes, and going beyond the Coptic chapel, where a solitary old priest was singing his service at the altar, we entered into a dark grotto, where were several appearances of ancient sepulchres hewn in the rock; and though some of them were very small, small, perhaps for children, they seemed to remove all doubt of the ground itself having been used as a place of burial, at a very early age.

As the last and most important monument within these walls, and that to which every other is made subservient, we entered the Holy Sepulchre itself, the venerated tomb of the Living God; an excavation originally made by human hands, though destined to contain, for a given period, the lifeless corpse of the great Creator and Director of the Universe!

To enter here, and kneel before the shrine, and kiss the marble that encases it with absolute indifference, I should hold to be impossible; but if I were asked what were the sentiments that possessed me at the moment of bowing before the altar, I should say, with Chateaubriand, that it would be impossible for me to describe them, and that such a train of ideas presented themselves at once to my mind, that none remained for a moment fixed there. My feelings, however, though equally indescribable as his own, were, I believe, of a very different kind.

After having been for some time the most honoured sanctuary of the Christians, it became a Pagan altar, and the statue of Jupiter usurped the place of Christ; while Venus was worshipped on the scene of his death, and Adonis bowed to on the spot which gave him birth. Constantine followed to break down the idols of the unbelievers, and the Persian Kosroes soon succeeded to rase again to the ground the edifice of the imperial Greek. Heraclius

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accident has not happened, notwithstanding that they were good Christians. Malabar Point, in the island of Bombay, is a similar hole of probation passed through by devout Hindoos; so that the notion seems to be borne out by examples in very opposite religions.

* Chateaubriand's Travels, vol. ii. p. 376. French edition, 8vo.