JE EUS AL Ε M. THE CITY OF HEROD AND SALADIN. CHAPTEK I. INTRODUCTORY. I T is our object to write a book which may serve as a historical account, complete so far as it goes, of the principal events with which Jerusalem is concerned, from the time when its history, as connected with the Bible, ceases, till the present ; that is to say, from the year A.r. 33 downwards. But it is difficult to take up the thread of the story at this date, and we are forced either to go as far back as Herod the Great, or to begin our narrative with the events which preceded the siege of Jerusalem by Titus. No date seems to us more ready to our hand than that of the death of Herod Agrippa. Even then we may seem beginning to tell a thrice told tale. The revolt of the Jews, their defeat of Cestius, the siege of Titus, are surely, it may be objected, too well known to require telling again. They are not well known, though they have been told again and again, and told with ten times the force, the vigour, the originality which we can put into these pages. But they are told here again because our central figure is Jerusalem. We have to show her first, in all her pride, the joy of the Jews, the visible mark of their greatness ; and then we have to follow her through two thousand years of varying fortune, always before the eyes of the world,—