ry ancient foundation, is built upon the
edge of the precipice at the bottom of which flows the brook Kedron,
which in the rainy season becomes a torrent. The buildings, which are of
immense strength, are supported by buttresses so massive that the upper
part of each is large enough to contain a small arched chamber; the
whole of the rooms in the monastery are vaulted, and are gloomy and
imposing in the extreme. The pyramidical-shaped mass of buildings
extends half-way down the rocks, and is crowned above by a high and
stately square tower, which commands the small iron gate of the
principal entrance. Within there are several small irregular courts
connected by steep flights of steps and dark arched passages, some of
which are carried through the solid rock.

It was in one of the caves in these rocks that the renowned St. Sabba
passed his time in the society of a pet lion. He was a famous anchorite,
and was made chief of all the monks of Palestine by Sallustius,
Patriarch of Jerusalem, about the year 490. He was twice ambassador to
Constantinople to propitiate the Emperors Anastasius the Silent and
Justinian; moreover he made a vow never to eat apples as long as he
lived. He was born at Mutalasca, near Caesarea of Cappadocia, in 439, and
died in 532, in the ninety-fifth year of his age: he is still held in
high veneration by both the Greek and Latin churches. He was the founder
of the Laura, which was formerly situated among the clefts and crevices
of these rocks, the present monastery having been enclosed and fortified
at I do not know what period, but long after the decease of the saint.

The word laura, which is often met with in the histories of the first
five centuries after Christ, signifies, when applied to monastic
institutions, a number of separate cells, each inhabited by a single
hermit or anchorite, in contradistinction to a convent or monastery,
which was called a coenobium, where the monks lived together in one
building under the rule of a superior. This species of monasticism seems
always to have been a peculiar characteristic of the Greek Church, and
in the present day these ascetic observances are upheld only by the
Greek, Coptic, and Abyssinian Christians, among whom hermits and
quietists, such as waste the body for the improvement of the soul, are
still to be met with in the clefts of the rocks and in the desert places
of Asia and Africa. They are a sort of dissenters as regards their own
Church, for