2 APRIL 1881, Page 19

Sacred Palm Lands ; or, the Journal of a Spring

Tour. By A. G. Weld. (Longmans.)—The authoress of this little volume may be honestly congratulated on having achieved a real success. Her Journal of a Spring Tour carries us over well-trodden paths, and the journalist is never forgetful of the fact. She writes, accordingly,

with much modesty, and with all becoming deference to such names as those of Stanley, Thomson, Tristram, Warren, and Condor, whose pages have made the later generation of readers so familiar with Paler- tine. But Miss Weld has looked with her own eyes on the various scenes through which she travelled from the Great Pyramid to Bey- rout. She has formed her own conclusions on several vexed questions, aoch as the actual sites of the Crucifixion and of the Holy Sepulchre, and the present writer is not prepared to dispute her belief that "the fair green bill" just without the Damascus Gate is the true Mount Calvary, although she is not unaware of the arguments which have been adduced against it, some writers oven contending that Calvary was not on the northern side of Jerusalem, but on the southern, on the slopes of the Valley of Hinnom itself, and alleging that the only locality around the Holy City at all suitable for the punishment of malefactors was that notable one, which was infamous on account of the terrible rites which had defiled it, and which was accursed in tho popular imagination,—the region whore the worm never died, and the the was never quenched. Many more elaborate and learned books about Egypt and Judea are in circulation among us, but as a wade-mecum of reverent, entertaining, and suggestive travel- talk about the countries to which it conducts us, we have not for some considerable time mot with one which wo can more cordially recommend to our readers than that of Miss Weld.