and justice." The strength of Venice was given her, so long as she remembered this: her destruction found her when she had forgotten this; and it found her irrevocably, because she forgot it without excuse. Never had city a more glorious Bible. Among the nations of the North, a rude and shadowy sculpture filled their temples with confused and hardly legible imagery; but, for her, the skill and the treasures of the East had gilded every letter, and illumined every page, till the Book-Temple shone from afar off like the star of the Magi. In other cities, the meetings of the people were often in places withdrawn from religious association, subject to violence and to change; and on the grass of the dangerous rampart, and in the dust of the troubled street, there were deeds done and counsels taken, which, if we cannot justify, we may sometimes forgive. But the sins of Venice, whether in her palace or in her piazza, were done with the Bible at her right hand. The walls on which its testimony was written were separated but by a few inches of marble from those which guarded the secrets of her councils, or confined the victims of her policy. And when in her last hours she threw off all shame and all restraint, and the great square of the city became filled with the madness of the whole earth, be it remembered how much her sin was greater, because it was done in the face of the House of God, burning with the letters of His Law. Mountebank and masquer laughed their laugh, and went their way; and a silence has followed them, not unforetold; for amidst them all, through century after century of gathering vanity and festering guilt, that white dome of St. Mark's had uttered in the dead ear of Venice, "Know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment.”

CHAPTER V.

BYZANTINE PALACES.

§ 1. THE account of the architecture of St. Mark's given in the previous chapter has, I trust, acquainted the reader sufficiently with the spirit of the Byzantine style: but he has probably, as yet, no clear idea of its generic forms. Nor would it be safe to define these after an examination of St. Mark's alone, built as it was upon various models, and at various periods. But if we pass through the city, looking for buildings which resemble St. Mark's-first, in the most important feature of incrustation; secondly, in the character of the mouldings, we shall find a considerable number, not indeed very attractive in their first address to the eye, but agreeing perfectly, both with each other, and with the earliest portions of St. Mark's, in every important detail; and to be regarded, therefore, with profound interest, as indeed the remains of an ancient city of Venice, altogether different in aspect from that which now exists. From these remains we may with safety deduce general conclusions touching the forms of Byzantine architecture, as practised in Eastern Italy, during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries.

§ II. They agree in another respect, as well as in style. All are either ruins, or fragments disguised by restoration. Not one of them is uninjured or unaltered; and the impossibility of finding so much as an angle or a single story in perfect condition is a proof, hardly less convincing than the method of

their architecture, that they were indeed raised during the earliest phases of the Venetian power. The mere fragments, dispersed in narrow streets, and recognizable by a single capital, or the segment of an arch, I shall not enumerate: but, of important remains, there are six in the immediate neighborhood of the Rialto, one in the Rio di Ca' Foscari, and one conspicuously placed opposite the great Renaissance Palace known as the Vendramin Calerghi, one of the few palaces still inhabited and well maintained; and noticeable, moreover, as having a garden beside it, rich with evergreens, and decorated by gilded railings and white statues that cast long streams of snowy reflection down into the deep water. The vista of canal beyond is terminated by the Church of St. Geremia, another but less attractive work of the Renaissance; a mass of barren brickwork, with a dull leaden dome above, like those of our National Gallery. So that the spectator has the richest and meanest of the late architecture of Venice before him at once: the richest, let him observe, a piece of private luxury; the poorest, that which was given to God. Then, looking to the left, he will see the fragment of the work of earlier ages, testifying against both, not less by its utter desolation than by the nobleness of the traces that are still left of it.

§ III. It is a ghastly ruin; whatever is venerable or sad in its wreck being disguised by attempts to put it to present uses of the basest kind. It has been composed of arcades borne by marble shafts, and walls of brick faced with marble: but the covering stones have been torn away from it like the shroud from a corpse; and its walls, rent into a thousand chasms, are filled and refilled with fresh brickwork, and the seams and hollows are choked with clay and whitewash, oozing and trickling over the marble,-itself blanched into dusty decay by the frosts of centuries. Soft grass and wandering * In the year 1851, by the Duchesse de Berri.

leafage have rooted themselves in the rents, but they are not suffered to grow in their own wild and gentle way, for the place is in a sort inhabited; rotten partitions are nailed across its corridors, and miserable rooms contrived in its western wing; and here and there the weeds are indolently torn down, leaving their haggard fibres to struggle again into unwholesome growth when the spring next stirs them: and thus, in contest between death and life, the unsightly heap is festering to its fall.

Of its history little is recorded, and that little futile. That it once belonged to the dukes of Ferrara, and was bought from them in the sixteenth century, to be made a general recep tacle for the goods of the Turkish merchants, whence it is now generally known as the Fondaco, or Fontico, de' Turchi, are facts just as important to the antiquary, as that, in the year 1852, the municipality of Venice allowed its lower story to be used for a "deposito di Tabacchi." Neither of this, nor of any other remains of the period, can we know anything but what their own stones will tell us.

§ IV. The reader will find in Appendix 11., written chiefly for the traveller's benefit, an account of the situation and present state of the other seven Byzantine palaces. Here I shall only give a general account of the most interesting points in their architecture.

They all agree in being round-arched and incrusted with marble, but there are only six in which the original disposition of the parts is any wise traceable; namely, those distinguished in the Appendix as the Fondaco de' Turchi, Casa Loredan, Caso Farsetti, Rio-Foscari House, Terraced House, and Madonnetta House*: and these six agree farther in having continuous arcades along their entire fronts from one angle to the

Of the Braided House and Casa Businello, described in the Appendix, only the great central arcades remain.

other, and in having their arcades divided, in each case, into a centre and wings; both by greater size in the midmost arches, and by the alternation of shafts in the centre, with pilasters, or with small shafts, at the flanks.

§ v. So far as their structure can be traced, they agree also in having tall and few arches in their lower stories, and shorter and more numerous arches above: but it happens most unfortunately that in the only two cases in which the second stories are left the ground floors are modernized, and in the others where the sea stories are left the second stories are modernized; so that we never have more than two tiers of the Byzantine arches, one above the other. These, however, are quite enough to show the first main point on which I wish to insist, namely, the subtlety of the feeling for proportion in the Greek architects; and I hope that even the general reader will not allow himself to be frightened by the look of a few measurements, for, if he will only take the little pains necessary to compare them, he will, I am almost certain, find the result not devoid of interest.

§ VI. I had intended originally to give elevations of all these palaces; but have not had time to prepare plates requiring so much labor and care. I must, therefore, explain the position of their parts in the simplest way in my power.

The Fondaco de' Turchi has sixteen arches in its sea story, and twenty-six above them in its first story, the whole based on a magnificent foundation, built of blocks of red marble, some of them seven feet long by a foot and a half thick, and raised to a height of about five feet above high-water mark. At this level, the elevation of one half of the building, from its flank to the central pillars of its arcades, is rudely given in Fig. IV., in the next page. It is only drawn to show the arrangement of the parts, as the sculptures which are indicated by the circles and upright oblongs between the arches are too delicate to be shown in a sketch three times the size