will live to see the end of confusion and the beginning of peace; the downfall of falsehood and oppression, and the restoration of himself (and others) to all their rights. May God grant it! There Was No Room For Them In The Inn. No place for Him! So Him you drive away; You drive away your God, your God. Oh! stay. O height of human madness! wonders rare! No place for Him! without Whom no place were. —_Crashaw._ Antar And Zara; Or, “The Only True Lovers.” I. An Eastern Romance Narrated In Songs. By Aubrey De Vere. Preface. Who has not heard of those Christian communities which have held their own during so many centuries, on the citied slopes of the Lebanon, or on the adjacent plains? Several of them have existed from a period earlier than that in which the foundations of our oldest monarchies were laid. The Maronites derive their name from Maron, a hermit of the IVth century, whose cell, on the banks of the Orontes, gradually attracted a Christian population about it. In the VIIth and VIIIth centuries, when the sword of the False Prophet was carrying all before it, they retreated from the uplands of the Euphrates and Mesopotamia to the fastnesses of the Lebanon. The Melchites, a race of unquestionably Arab origin, and whose religious offices are still celebrated in Arabic, emigrated to Syria before the Christian era, and became Christian in the IVth century. Weakened by their hereditary feuds, they retain, notwithstanding, all the pride of their ancient stock, and not less all its heroism, its generosity, its hospitality, its sense of honor, and its passion for poetry and eloquence. The devotion of both these races to their Faith is sufficiently attested by their having retained it during so many centuries of wrong, and in spite of so many persecutions. In the massacres of 1860 alone about 12,000 of them perished.