IT may at first sight appear strange that any form of architecture in Syria should be treated as a part of that of Italy, but the circumstances of the case are so exceptional that there can be little doubt of the correctness of so doing. Gothic architecture was not a natural growth in Palestine, but distinctly an importation of the Crusaders, transplanted by them to a soil where it took no root, and from which it died out when the fostering care of Western protection was removed. In this it is only too true a reflex of the movement to which it owed its origin. The Crusades furnish one of those instances in the history of the world where the conquerors of a nation have been so numerous as entirely to supplant, for a time, the native population and the indigenous institutions of the country. For nearly a century Jerusalem was subject to kings and barons of a foreign race. The feudal system was imported entire, with its orders of knighthood, its “Assises,” and all the concomitant institutions which had grown up with the feudal system in Western Europe. With them, as a matter of course, came the hierarchy of the Roman Church, and with it the one style of architecture which they then knew, or which was appropriate to their form of worship. The one point which is not at first sight obvious is, why the Gothic style in Palestine should be so essentially Italian, with so little admixture of the styles prevalent on the northern side of the Alps. It may have been that then, as now, the Italians settled loosely in the land. We know that the trade of the Levant was at that time in the hands of Venice and other Italian cities, and it is clear that it was easier to send to Italy for artists and workmen, than to France and Germany, and much more likely that an Italian would undertake the erection of buildings in the East than a Northern architect, whose ideas of Palestine and its ways must have been extremely indistinct. Be this as it may, there is little in the Gothic architecture of Palestine either as regards arrangement or details—except the plan of the church of the Holy Sepulchre—which would excite attention as singular if found in the South of Italy or Sicily; and as little that would not seem out of place if found on our side of the Alps. HOLY SEPULCHRE. The principal buildings erected by the Crusaders in Palestine were, as might be expected, the extensive additions made to the church or rather to the group of churches near the Holy Sepulchre—the deliverance of which from the hands of the infidels was the object of that wonderful burst of national enthusiasm.[9]