This Easter miracle at the Holy Sepulchre has been the theme of most travellers who have witnessed it ever since the days of Charlemagne. Henry Maundrell (_Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem_, etc., 96) was present at the Easter festival (1697) during the ceremony kept up by the Greeks and Armenians, upon the persuasion that every Easter a miraculous flame descends from heaven into the Holy Sepulchre. He describes the fearful tumult and clamour made by the people in their wild excitement in anticipation of the miraculous appearance of the Holy Fire at the sepulchre, produced, as he exposes, by the two miracle-mongers, the Greek and Armenian bishops, who had entered the sepulchre alone for the purpose. When they issued with two blazing torches in their hands, all the people rushed with candles that they might obtain the purest fire sent down from heaven, which they instantly applied to their beards, faces, and bosoms, pretending that it would not burn like an earthly flame; but Maundrell says he saw plainly that none could endure the experiment long enough to make good that pretension. Dean Stanley, who was at Jerusalem in 1853 (_Sinaï and Palestine_, 467), states that Maundrell’s account is an almost exact transcript of what was still to be seen. Captain Warren also witnessed the strange doings in 1867–70 (_Underground Jerusalem_, 429–437); and in _The Graphic_, Sept. 21, 1878, was published an interesting illustration of the interior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre during the performance of the miracle, together with a short account of the proceedings. “After a procession of bishops and priests thrice round the building, the Patriarch enters the Sepulchre. Now the noise becomes greater and greater ... making the place more like an Inferno than the Church of Christ.... The Holy Fire now issues from the holes in the walls, and hundreds of hands are stretched out as they frantically try to light their candles at the flame.... By this time one candle has ignited the other, and the crowd below is one mass of moving flame.” There is no abatement, in this the 19th century, in the huge sham, with its attendant blind superstition and noisy demonstrations.—ED. (5.) “the priests from the country of Prester John.”—Upon descending the steps on the east side of Calvary (Raumer, _Palæstina_, etc., 301), another flight of twenty-four steps is reached, at the foot of which is the Chapel of St. Helena, whence another flight of eleven steps conducts to the place where the cross of Christ and those of the two thieves were found. Here is an altar of the Latin church. The chapel of the Jacobites must have been higher up, near the Chapel of St. John which enclosed the tomb of the Baron of the Holy Sepulchre and of his brother, the first king of Jerusalem; interesting monuments that have been destroyed, not by the Turks but by the Greeks (Richter, _Wallfahrten in Morgenlande_, 22).—BRUUN.