(a.d. 1799) with a force that swept all resistance before it, he captured the Turkish 
posts in rapid succession, and made himself master of Jaffa after a slight combat. But 
there his success terminated. Our space does not allow of the further details of this 
most romantic enterprise. The execution of the garrison of Jaffa is a matter of painful 
historic record. Ill-fortune fell upon the invasion, and the proverbial skill of the leader 
and gallantly of the troops were baffled before the crumbling fortifications of Acre. 
In after days, Napoleon, at St. Helena, was accustomed to regard the Syrian 
campaign as a crisis in his fortunes,—as the counteraction of a great design of con¬ 
quest,— as the casualty which compelled him to remodel his plan of empire. “ That 
campaign,” said he, “ cut asunder the chain which I would have twined round the 
East — it broke my spell —it forced me to turn my face to Europe.” 
The figures in the foreground are Polish Jews returning from their pilgrimage to 
Jerusalem, and waiting for embarkation. 
JAFFA. 
The appearance of Jaffa from the sea is stately. To eyes wearied with the monotony 
of the shore, and the hovels which form its villages, its situation is commanding, from 
its being built on a cone-shaped eminence which dips boldly into the sea, and from the 
extreme inequality of the ground, which thus shows all its buildings in one view. Most 
of the streets are paved in steps; and the houses, some of which are of considerable 
size, stand in terraces, and thus add to the general effect. But the cypress and other 
trees, which so often raise their heads in the larger Oriental towns, and whose verdure 
adds so gracefully to the scene, are here wanting, and Jaffa is simply a succession of 
roofs rising above each other, bare, brown, and melancholy. 
Besides its authentic history, to which reference is made in another portion of these 
pages, Jaffa figures in a strange mixture of Hebrew and Heathen tradition. Here Noah 
is said to have built the Ark ! — here Andromeda to have been exposed to the Sea- 
monster;— and here Perseus to have bathed the wounds received in his battle with 
the Centaurs. But a more painful appeal is made to human memory in the Hospital, 
where the unfortunate French soldiery died, and which is now the Armenian Convent; 
and in the grave of the Turkish prisoners of El-Arish, which is still pointed out to 
travellers, at a mile south of the town. 1 
1 G. Robinson’s Travels. 
