from the circumstance of a certain number of covers being daily placed in a kind of wheel, or turning cylinder, so contrived as to convey dishes to the interior, without any possibility of observing the person who received them. If any of them died, the event was kept as secret as when he massacred them with his own hands. In his public works he aimed at magnificence. He built the mosque, the bazar, and an elegant public fountain at Acre, using the extensive remains of Cesarea as a quarry. In all these works he was himself both the engineer and the architect: he formed the plans, drew the designs, and superintended the execution. He was his own minister, chancellor, treasurer, and secretary; often his own cook and gardener; and not unfrequently both judge and executioner in the same instant. Such is the account given of this extraordinary man by Baron de Tott, Volney, and Dr. Clarke. Yet, with the shortsighted and narrow-minded policy of an Oriental despot, he sacrificed to his avarice the permanent prosperity of the districts which he governed. During the latter years of his administration, more especially, towns that had once been flourishing, were reduced by his oppression to a few cottages, and luxuriant plains were abandoned to the wandering Arabs. His successor is described by Dr. Richardson as a man of milder, if not more enlightened character. He met him at Tiberias in 1817, to which place his highness had come for the benefit of the hot spring: he was a venerable-looking old man, with a long flowing white beard, and his manner was kind and unaffected. “Unlike his butchering predecessor,” says Dr. R.," this respectable viceroy bears the character of a humane and good man, and nothing could

exceed the respect which was shewn him by his attendants.*

Acre, more properly Akka, † the ancient Ptolemais (Acts xxi. 7.), is situated at the north angle of the bay to which it gives its name, and which extends in a semicircle of three leagues as far as the point of Carmel. During the Crusades, it sustained several sieges. After the expulsion of the knights of St. John of Jerusalem, it fell rapidly into decay, and was almost deserted, ‡ till Djezzar Pasha, by repairing the town and harbour, made it one of the first towns on the coast. In modern times it has been rendered celebrated for the successful stand it made, with the aid of the British under Sir Sidney Smith, against the French troops commanded by General Bonaparte, who was obliged to raise the siege, after failing in his twelfth assault. It is twenty-seven miles South of Tyre, twenty-three N.N.W. of Jerusalem. Its present population is estimated at 20,000. Few traces remain of its former splendour. The external view of Acre, says Dr. Clarke, like that of any other town on the Levant, is the only prospect of it worth beholding. The interior presents, as in the generality of Turkish cities, narrow, dirty lanes, with wretched shops, and as wretched inhabitants. Sandys noticed "the ruins of a palace which yet doth acknowledge king Richard for the founder, confirmed likewise by the passant lion." Dr. Clarke describes the remains

* Travels along the Mediterranean, vol. ii. p. 431.

The Accho of the Hebrew Scriptures. Judges i. 31. The AKH of Strabo.

In 1610, Sandys states that there were not above 200 or 300 inhabitants.

of a considerable edifice answering to this account, which were conspicuous among the buildings on the left of the mosque towards the north side of the city. Some pointed arches, and part of the cornice, were all that remained: the latter was ornamented with enormous stone busts, exhibiting a series of hideous, distorted countenances —a representation, perhaps, of the heads of Saracens. The Gothic architecture, he supposes, led to the idea of its having been "king Richard's palace;" but, at the period referred to by the tradition, the English were hardly capable of erecting buildings of that character, and its origin may be assigned with more probability to the Genoese who assisted Baldwin in the capture of Acre, A.D. 1104; the lion being a symbol of Genoa. The ruins in question are probably those of the cathedral church of St. Andrew, described both by Doubdan, a French traveller, who visited Acre in 1652, and by Maundrell, as the most conspicuous object, standing on an eminence not far from the sea-shore. Maundrell particularises other ruins referable to the same period; the church of St. John, the tutelar saint of the city in the time of the knights templars, who changed its name from Ptolemais to St. John d'Acre; the convent of the knights hospitallers; the palace of the grand master of that order, of which a large staircase was still standing;* and “ many other ruins of churches, palaces, monasteries, forts, &c., extending for more

This, Pococke states to have been "repaired and inhabited by the great Feckerdine, prince of the Druses."-" At the end of this building," he adds,." are the remains of what seem to have been a very grand saloon, and a smaller room, of the same architecture, at the end of that. To the south there was a noble well-built chapel, the walls of which are (A.D. 1738) almost entire."

than half a mile in length; in all which you may discern marks of so much strength, as if every building in the city had been contrived for war and defence." "The carcass," says Sandys, "shews that the body hath been strong, double immured, fortified with bulwarks and towers, to each wall a ditch lined with stone, and under those, divers secret posterns. You would think by the ruins, that the city rather consisted wholly of divers conjoining castles, than any way mixed with private dwellings, which witness a notable defence and an unequal assault, or that the rage of the conquerors extended beyond conquest; the huge walls and arches turned topsy-turvy, and lying like rocks upon the foundation." The strength of the city arose in part from its advantageous situation. On the south and west sides it was washed by the sea; it had a small bay to the east, which Pococke describes as now almost filled up; and he is of opinion, that the river Belus was brought through the fosse which ran along the ramparts on the north, thus making the city an island.* At the period of Dr. Clarke's visit, the ruins, with the exception of the cathedral, the arsenal, the college of the knights, and the palace of the grand master, were so intermingled with modern buildings, and in such a state of utter subversion, that it was difficult, he says, to afford any satisfactory description of them; and Mr. Buckingham, who was at Acre in 1816, affirms that "the Christian ruins are altogether

"I have great reason to think that the river Belus was brought along through the fossée, because it is mentioned in the account of the siege, that a certain body of men attacked the city, from the bridge over the Belus to the bishop's palace. I examined the ground, and discovered what I supposed to be the remains of the channel, and actually saw the ruins of a small bridge over it, near the town, and of a larger further on."- Travels in the East, book i. chap. 13.

gone;" and " even the three Gothic arches called by the English sailors king Richard's palace, have been razed to the ground." Shafts of red and grey granite, and marble pillars, were to be seen throughout the town; some used as thresholds to doorways, others as supporters to piazzas, besides several slabs of fine marble. "Many superb remains were observed by us," says Dr. Clarke, "in the pasha's palace, in the khan, the mosque, the public bath, the fountains, and other works of the town, consisting of fragments of antique marble, the shafts and capitals of granite and marble pillars, masses of the verd antique breccia, of ancient serpentine, and of the syenite and trap of Egypt. In the garden of Djezzar's palace, leading to his summer apartment, we saw some pillars of yellow variegated marble, of extraordinary beauty; but these, he informed us, he had procured from the ruins of Cesarea, upon the coast between Acre and Jaffa, together with almost all the marble used in the decoration of his very sumptuous mosque. A beautiful. fountain of white marble, close to the entrance of his palace, has also been constructed with materials from those ruins.". "The bath is the finest and best built of any that we saw in the Turkish empire. Every kind of antique marble, together with large pillars of Egyptian granite, might be observed among the materials employed in building it."

The country about Acre abounds in cattle, corn, olives, and linseed. A great quantity of cotton was, in the time of Djezzar Pasha, exported from the place. In the light sandy soil, containing a mixture of black vegetable earth, which lies near the town, Dr. Clarke observed plantations of water-melons, pumpkins, and a little corn. Half a mile east of the city, is a small hill, improved by art, about half a mile in length, and