reek architecture, then, with its two orders, was clumsily
copied and varied by the Romans with no particular result, until they
begun to bring the arch into extensive practical service; except only
that the Doric capital was spoiled in endeavors to mend it, and the
Corinthian much varied and enriched with fanciful, and often very
beautiful imagery. And in this state of things came Christianity: seized
upon the arch as her own; decorated it, and delighted in it; invented a
new Doric capital to replace the spoiled Roman one: and all over the
Roman empire set to work, with such materials as were nearest at hand,
to express and adorn herself as best she could. This Roman Christian
architecture is the exact expression of the Christianity of the time,
very fervid and beautiful--but very imperfect; in many respects
ignorant, and yet radiant with a strong, childlike light of imagination,
which flames up under Constantine, illumines all the shores of the
Bosphorus and the Aegean and the Adriatic Sea, and then gradually, as the
people give themselves up to idolatry, becomes Corpse-light. The
architecture sinks into a settled form--a strange, gilded, and embalmed
repose: it, with the religion it expressed; and so would have remained
for ever,--so _does_ remain, where its languor has been undisturbed.[19]
But rough wakening was ordained for it.

Sec. XXI. This Christian art of the declining empire is divided into two
great branches, western and eastern; one centred at Rome, the other at
Byzantium, of which the one is the early Christian Romanesque, properly
so called, and the other, carried to higher imaginative perfection by
Greek workmen, is distinguished from it as Byzantine. But I wish the
reader, for the present, to class these two branches of art together in
his mind, they being, in points of main importance, the same; that is to
say, both of them a true continuance and sequence of the art of old Rome
itself, flowing uninterruptedly down from the fountain-head, and
entrusted always to the best workmen who could be found--Latins in Italy
and Greeks in Greece; and thus both branches may be ranged under the
general term of Christian Romanesque, an architecture which had lost the
refinement of Pagan art in the degradation of the empire, but which was
elevated by Christianity to higher aims, and by the fancy of the Greek
workmen endowed with brighter forms. And this art the reader may
conceive as extending in its various branches