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for the Latin transcribers to have added them. But whence this idea is derived, it is hard to say. Perhaps some ancient city in Judea, which the son of Sirach had seen, might have somewhat resembled the modern capital of Persia, and be in miniature what Sir John Chardin found Ispahan. A river ran through a noble long place there, where they were wont to take the air, and which was the most beautiful place of the kind he ever saw or heard of. It was crossed by streets in several places, he tells us, which are large canals of water, planted with a double row of lofty plane-trees, the one near the canal, the other next the houses. These trees not only made the streets in which they were planted extremely beautiful and pleasant, but it seems the Persians believed them to be very conducive to the preserving that city in health; for he says in another tome, that the "Persians say it is owing to the plane-tree, that they are preserved from the pestilence; and Kalife Sulton, the grand vizier of Sephi Ist, often said to him, as I have heard him affirm, that it was from the time that the king his father had caused these trees to be planted, in the city and territory of Ispahan, that the pestilence had never visited them."a

We are not to suppose this is somewhat peculiar to Ispahan, for he tells us in another page, that many other cities of Persia are full of planted plane-trees, and particularly that of Shiras; the Persians being persuaded of that a Tom. 2, p. 201.

7 Tom. 3, p. 56, 57.

tree's having the property of being good against the pestilence, and every other kind of infection in the air.b

The trees, which are wont to be planted in our English cities and towns, are lime-trees; in Persia we find they are plane-trees, that are used to decorate their streets, and where there is water they grow to a great height; in Constantinople they have abundance of cypress-trees, the Turks using them not merely in their burialplaces, but in their palaces, and private houses of distinction.d

Whether this circumstance, (the making mention of plane-trees in the streets,) may be supposed to discover any thing of the countries into which the writer of the book of Ecclesiasticus travelled, by making great impression on his immagination, I leave to be considered; certainly the idea was not derived from Egyptian towns, (they are surrounded with palm-trees,*) which country the preface of this book tells us he met with a writing, which was the groundwork of this compilation of wise sayings, and where he gave it its finishing strokes. In the book itself he is described as a Jew of Jerusalem, ch. 1. 27; but he is represented in another

P. 11. Their being planted then of late at Ispahan, was owing, I apprehend, to the Sophi family's making Ispahan their capital, and for that purpose greatly enlarging it, and endeavouring to make it as healthful, as well as magnificient as they could.

De Tott's Mem. tom. 1, p. 5.-Phil. Trans. abridg. vol. iii. part 2, ch. 2. art. 39, p. 464.

Russell's list. of Aleppo, vol. i. p. 14.
De Tott, tom. iv. p 63, 64.

part of it as a great traveller. A man that hath travelled knoweth many things: and he that hath much experience will declare wisdom. He that hath no experience knoweth little: but he that hath travelled is full of prudence. When I travelled, I saw many things, and I understand more than I can express. Ch. xxxiv. 9, 10, 11.

OBSERVATION VI.

By the Horn of the Son of Oil, used by Isaiah, Syria

is meant.

THE land of Israel is called by the Prophet Isaiah, chap. v, 1. A vineyard in the horn of the son of oil. That curious expositor Vitringa seems to suppose it is so represented on account of its height; and such seems to have been the thought of our translators, for they render the words, A vineyard in a very fruitful hill. Hills are undoubtedly the proper places. for planting vineyards; and GoD might justly upbraid Israel with the goodness of the country in which he had placed them, its mountains themselves being fertile but if that was the sole intention, is it not somewhat strange that the Prophet should, on this occasion, use an expression so extremely figurative? especially as the same Prophet elsewhere often speaks of the hills with simplicity.

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I will not deny, that it is agreeable enough to the Eastern style, to express a hill by the term horn: for the supposition of Bishop Pococke seems to be by no means unnatural, who tells us, that there is a low mountain in Galilee, which has both its ends raised in such a manner as to look like two mounts, which are called the Horns of Hutin; and, as he thinks, from this circumstance, and the village of Hutin's being underneath it. But then it is to be remembered, that the term horn may equally well at least be understood in a different sense; so Sir John Chardin informs us, that a long strip of land, that runs out into the Caspian sea, is called the middle-sized horn; and so d'Herbelot tells us, that the place where one of the branches of the Euphrates falls into the Tigris, is called the horn. By the horn then of the son of oil, the Prophet might mean Syria, which is bordered on one side by the sea, and on the other by a most barren desert, and stretches out from its base to the south like a horn; and so these words will be a geographic description of Judea, of the poetic kind, representing it as seated in particular in the fertile country of Syria, rather than in a general and intermediate way, as situated in a fertile hill.

The propriety of describing Syria as a Vol. 2, p. 67.

In his account of the coronation of Solyman III. p. 151. i P. 353.

country of oil, no one will, I suppose, contest, as we find that oil was wont anciently to be carried from thence to Egypt, Hos. xii. 1; and as we find the celebrated Croisade historian, William of Tyre, describing Syria Sobal as all thick set with olive-trees, so as to make prodigious woods that covered the whole country, affording its inhabitants in those times, as they did their predecessors, a livelihood, and the destruction of which must have been their ruin.

OBSERVATION VII

Of the Fertility of Judea.

THIS leads us to consider with attention, the description that is given of the plenty of that country which God gave to Israel. The LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains, and depths, that spring out of valleys and hills. A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig-trees, and pomegranates, a land of oil-olive, (or of the olive-tree of oil, according to the margin,) and honey, &c. Deut. viii. 7, 8.

I would set down some passages illustrating this description, just as they occur in writers, who have accidentally had occasion to mention matters of this sort.

* Page 883.

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