an order of religious, making one of the four tribes of mendicants or begging friars; and taking its name from Mount Carmel, formerly inhabited by Elias, Elifha, and the children of the prophets; from whom this order pretends to descend in an uninterrupted succession. The manner in which they make out their antiquity has something in it too ridiculous to be rehearsed. Some among them pretend they are descendants of Jesus Christ: others go further, and make Pythagoras a Carmelite, and the ancient druids regular branches of their order. Phocas, a Greek monk, speaks the most reasonably. He says, that in his time 1185, Elias's cave was still extant on the mountain; near which were the remains of a building which intimated that there had been anciently a monastery; that, some years before, an old monk, a priest of Calabria, by revelation, as he pretended, from the prophet Elias, fixed there, and assembled ten brothers. In 1229, Albert, patriarch of Jerusalem, gave the solitaries a rigid rule, which Papebroch has since printed. In 1217, or, according to others, 1226, Pope Honorius III. approved and confirmed it. This rule contained 16 articles; one of which confined them to their cells, and enjoined them to continue day and night in prayer; another prohibited the brethren having any property; another enjoined fasting from the feast of the holy cross till Easter, except on Sundays; abstinence at all times from flesh was enjoined by another article; one obliged them to manual labour; another imposed a strict silence on them from vespers till the tierce the next day.

The peace concluded by the emperor Frederic II. with the Saracens, in the year 1229, to disadvantageous to Christendom, and so beneficial to the infidels, occasioned the Carmelites to quit the Holy Land, under Alan the fifth general of the Order. He first sent some of the religious to Cyprus, who landed there in the year 1328, and founded a monastery in the forest of Fortania. Some Sicilians, at the same time, leaving Mount Carmel, returned to their own country, where they founded a monastery in the suburbs of Messina. Some English departed out of Syria, in the year 1240, to found others in England. Others of Provence, in the year 1244, founded a monastery in the desert of Aigualates, a league from Marfilles; and thus, the number of their monasteries increasing, they held their European general chapter in the year 1245, at their monastery of Aylesford in England.—This order is so much increased, that it has, at present,