Beautiful as it is, even in our own day, it was yet more beautiful when, seven centuries ago, it was the Christian capital of the East. Its snow-white palaces sparkled like jewels against the dark woods of Carmel which rose towards the south. To the east there stretched away the glorious plain, over which the eye might wander till it lost itself in the blue outlines of hills on which no Christian eye could gaze unmoved; for they hid in their bosom the village of Nazareth and the waters of Tiberias, and had been trodden all about by the feet of One whose touch had made them holy ground. That rich and fertile plain, now marshy and deserted, but then a very labyrinth of fields and vineyards, circled Acre also to the north; but there the eye was met by a new boundary,—the snowy summits of a lofty mountain range whose bases were clothed with cedar; while all along the lovely coast broke the blue waves of that mighty sea whose shores are the empires of the world. And there lay Acre among her gardens; the long rows of her marble houses, with their flat roofs, forming terraces odorous with orange-trees, and rich with flowers of a thousand hues, which silken awnings shaded from the sun. You might walk from one end of the city to the other on these terraced roofs, and never once descend into the streets; and the streets themselves were Wide and airy, their shops brilliant with the choicest merchandise of the East, and thronged with the noblest chivalry of Europe. It was the gayest, gallantest city in existence; its gilded steeples stood out against the mountains, or above the horizon of those bright waters that tossed and sparkled in the flood of southern sunshine, and in the fresh breeze that kissed them from the west; every house was rich with painted glass,—for this art, as yet rare in Europe, is spoken of by all writers as lavishly employed in Acre, and was perhaps first brought from thence by the Crusaders; every nation had its street, inhabited by its own merchants and nobles, and no less than twenty crowned heads kept up within the city-walls their palaces and courts. The emperor of Germany, and the kings of England, France, Sicily, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, and Jerusalem, had each their residence there; while the Templars and the Teutonic order had establishments as well as the Hospitallers, and on a scarcely less sumptuous scale.