Moseley, who, in the eloquent essays which have just been republished, would raise Strafford and Laud to a high pitch of patriotism and statesmanship. Their statesmanship brought them, not unjustly, to the scaffold. Mr. Gardiner takes a middle course. He gives them credit for honourable motives and a mistaken zeal in the service of the Crown; but he does not forget that the lesson of their failure and their fall rendered a lasting service to the liberties of England.

ART. IV.-1. Tent Work in Palestine. A Record of Discovery and Adventure. By CLAUDE REGNIER CONDER, R.E., Officer in command of the Survey Expedition. Published for the Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund. 2 volumes. London: 1878.

2. The Temples of the Jews and the other Buildings in the Haram Area at Jerusalem. By JAMES FERGUSSON, D.C.L., F.R.S., &c. London: 1878.

THE

HE interest with which Lieutenant Conder's volumes must be read by all who take them up will not be confined to any one class of readers. They are full of information for the historian and the archæologist, for the lovers of natural beauty and the lovers of adventure; and of all such there are few probably who will rise from the perusal of this work without a feeling of gratitude to the scanty band of explorers who have performed with untiring energy a task beset with difficulty and danger. The perils thus faced were caused sometimes by the fanaticism of the people; but those which arose from the climate were both more constant and more formidable. In spite of all hindrances the results achieved are highly satisfactory. In no field of enquiry was there greater reason to dread the multiplication of theories and hypotheses; and by no explorers has the temptation to multiply them been more steadily resisted than by the officers of the surveying expedition sent to Palestine. It is true that in the volumes before us we have simply Lieutenant Conder's personal history of his own work and that of his colleagues. The Exploration Committee wisely decline to be responsible collectively for the conclusions of any of their officers. But their

official sanction will be given to the great map exhibiting the complete result of the survey and to the elaborate memoir by which each of its twenty-six sheets will be illustrated. The enterprise which the Palestine Exploration Society has thus

far carried on with signal success is in the highest degree honourable to the members of that body, to the officers they have employed, and to the British nation. It has given a fresh and lively interest to the oldest records and the most sacred traditions of our race, for nothing in history is so astonishing as the influence which the wild inhabitants of these rough valleys and burning plains have had on the religions of the modern world. The books of Samuel and of Kings acquire an intense reality as we trace step by step in Lieutenant Conder's narrative every locality known in the Jewish annals, and the authenticity of the Old and New Testaments is never more fully established than by a comparison with the sites they describe. Readers who have followed Dean Stanley through his chapters on Sinai and Palestine will find here descriptions, scarcely less vivid than his, of many scenes which the Dean could not visit or to which he could give little attention. It is in truth a land the greater part of which may be swept by the eye from its more commanding peaks; and it may be doubted whether the twin ranges of Lebanon can furnish a view so vast in its expanse as that which is spread out before the traveller from the summit of Hermon. Stretching to Carmel and Tabor, eighty miles away, to the south, it displays to the west and north the golden sea and mighty masses of mountains even more majestic than itself, and to the east the brown and desolate plain broken only in the distance by the intense verdure of the oasis of Damascus. Words must fail to do justice to such a scene as this when at sundown it clothes itself with excess of splendour in the transparent air of Syria.

'The sun began to set, a deep ruby flush came over all the scene, and warm purple shadows crept slowly on. The Sea of Galilee was lit up with a delicate greenish-yellow hue, between its dim walls of hill. The flush died out in a few minutes, and a pale steel-coloured shade succeeded, although to us, at a height of 9.150 feet, the sun was still visible, and the rocks around us still ruddy. A long pyramidal shadow slid down to the eastern foot of Hermon and crept across the great plain; Damascus was swallowed up by it, and finally the pointed end of the shadow stood out distinctly against the sky, a dusky cone of dull colour against the flush of the after-glow. It was the shadow of the mountain itself, stretching away for seventy miles across the plainthe most marvellous shadow perhaps to be seen anywhere.' p. 264.)

(Vol. i.

At the least it would be not less striking than the solemn veil which the peak of Athos throws across wellnigh fifty miles of sea over the island of Lemnos, or the expanse of dark

ness which is spread by the mightier mass of Teneriffe upon the solitary ocean. But scenes such as these are not to be met with commonly in Palestine, which, as a whole and in its present state, is not a cheerful-looking country; and Mr. Conder is right in presenting to us both the land and its inhabitants as they are, and not as a picture taken in some highly-favoured spots might lead us to imagine them. There is indeed much to interest us everywhere; but of actual beauty there is commonly a great lack. Not a little of the country is gloomy and repulsive, and Jerusalem is a very ugly city. But none the less the country, its cities, and its villages have a charm which they cannot lose, and which may be heightened if happier times should yet be in store for them. The very hewers of wood and drawers of water furnish subjects for curious speculation, and the scanty remnants of some old communities stir up perplexing questions in the history of the chosen people. Have we still in the Fellahin the descendants of the Canaanitish tribes whom the swords of Joshua and his followers failed to exterminate? and in the Samaritans of Schechem do we still see the survivors of the ancient stock which set up its schismatical worship on Mount Gerizim ? Mr. Conder is inclined to answer both these questions in the affirmative, and he regards the language of the peasantry as still substantially Aramaic with a large infusion of Arabic words. The genuineness of the Samaritan claims he accepts on the grounds partly of the strong physical likeness between Samaritans and Jews, partly of religious usage and belief, and in part also of statements in the Old Testament. The historical books, it is true, are far from giving countenance to the absurd dreams which discover the lost tribes in Irishmen or in North American Indians; but on the other hand they scarcely warrant the conclusion that the great catastrophe in the days of Hoshea left the main bulk of the population untouched, the nobles and chief men only being carried away. This is practically what is said of Judea after the overthrow of the Jewish monarchy by Nebuchadnezzar; but with regard to Samaria the words are explicit that Israel in a body was carried away captive, and a strange population from Babylon and many other cities introduced in their stead. Nor does the story that an Israelitish priest was sent to this motley people to teach them the manner of the God of the land tell much in favour of the notion that his services were needed for those of the Israelites who had not been hurried away from their homes. It would rather be decisive the other way. The strictly local religion which led the Philistines to see in the ark of the

covenant the gods that smote the Egyptians with all the ' plagues in the wilderness 'led the Syrian newcomers to dread the action of the deity or deities presiding over their new homes, and to ask the ministrations of a priest acquainted with the special method of propitiating them. Still less can we infer with Mr. Conder that the Assyrian conqueror would seem to have left a certain proportion of the Israelites behind him, 'as 'we find Hezekiah sending messengers through the country of Ephraim and Manasseh, inviting Israelites to the Passover which might not be eaten by strangers, and as some actually attended it.' The fact that this invitation was sent is mentioned only in the books of Chronicles; but we are at the same time told not less carefully that the passover to which they were thus summoned was celebrated in the first year of Hezekiah's reign, and six years therefore before the overthrow of the Israelitish kingdom. Nor can the contempt with which the message was treated be explained on any other supposition than that the people of Samaria had thus far no reason to look with less jealous eyes on the spiritual claims set forth by the priests of the rival kingdom. But although Mr. Conder's conclusion has no direct warrant from the language of the books of Kings or Chronicles, we cannot forget the tendency of the Eastern mind to represent the ruin of many as the ruin of all, and to exaggerate especially the misfortunes of enemies. Hence the chronicler who would be careful to tell us that the countryfolk of Judæa were left in their old homes would for the same reason assure us that from Samaria the whole population had been swept away in a mass. These Anastases, as Herodotus calls them, were probably never effected thus systematically; and we may in this instance fairly note the fact that shortly after the fall of Jerusalem before the hosts of Nebuchadnezzar some fourscore men are said to have come from Samaria, with clothes rent and with offerings and incense in their hands, to bring them to the house of the Lord. This, beyond doubt, is a confession that these men, whoever they were, looked upon themselves as allied in religion and therefore by blood with the subjects of Zedekiah, a confession which stirred up the fanatical wrath of Ishmael, who, having as a patriot murdered the governor appointed by Nebuchadnezzar, showed his religious zeal by treacherously slaying these men also. Nor are we justified in setting aside as worthless the Samaritan tradition that the exiles restored to Palestine by the order of Cyrus were not confined to the house of Judah, that the Israelites and Jews formed themselves into one body at Horan before they crossed the borders of the Holy Land,

that here they quarrelled as to the site of the future temple, and that, while Zerubbabel with his followers went off to Jerusalem, the rest of the congregation, 300,000 in all, were led to Gerizim, where they placed their sanctuary. This resolution, we are further told, was determined by the fact that when the Jews sought the sanction of Darius for rebuilding the temple on Mount Moriah, the Samaritans urged a counterclaim for Gerizim, that in order to settle the question copies of the law made by Sanballat and Zerubbabel were thrown into a large fire, and that while the copy written by the latter was at once burnt, that of the former thrice leaped out unhurt. It would be strange, if true, that this fire-tried manuscript is now the property of a poor widow in Jerusalem, and that it has made the journey to this country, where it failed to obtain the sum asked as its price, 1,000l. It is scarcely less surprising to hear that the Samaritan community, which, according to their own records, occupied in the seventh century the whole of Palestine except the Judean hills, and has had its synagogues in Rome, Cairo, and Damascus, should now be confined to the town of Nablous, where Jewish hatred has made the Greek name Neapolis triumph over the ancient Schechem, and that here they have dwindled down almost to nothing. In 1872, we are told, they numbered only 135, eighty of these being males. The Moslems say that this number is never exceeded, and that one of the eighty dies as soon as a child is born.' (Vol. i. p. 54.) In other towns, Mr. Conder says, they appear to have become extinct about the year 1820 (vol. i. p. 46); but a tradition affirming their simultaneous disappearance from many places would be scarcely less suspicious than the Moslem notion which gets rid of one of eighty males on the birth of every boy. But, whatever be the rate of decay, it seems to be in great part the result of intermarriage and of an exclusiveness which absolutely cuts off all infusion of new blood. Perhaps for this very reason the likeness of Samaritans to Jews is rendered still more striking. Mr. Conder notes the beauty of their priestly family as being especially remarkable, and the contrast of the lean and weedy figures both of Samaritans and Palestinian Jews with the obesity of the Turks and the sturdiness of the peasantry.' But during the whole Christian era Jews and Samaritans have probably never intermarried, and the singularly strong likeness still existing between them tells much in favour of the conclusion that both spring from the same stock.

The Samaritans, it would seem, must soon become a people