eing, in the early porches of
Rouen and Lisieux, hollowed out and worked into branching tracery: and
at Bourges, for distant effect, worked into plain leaves, or bold bony
processes with knobs at the points, and near the spectator, into
crouching demons and broad winged owls, and other fancies and
intricacies, innumerable and inexpressible.

[Illustration: Fig. LVI.]

Sec. XI. Thus much is enough to be noted respecting edge decoration.
We were next to consider the fillet. Professor Willis has noticed an
ornament, which he has called the Venetian dentil, "as the most
universal ornament in its own district that ever I met with;" but has
not noticed the reason for its frequency. It is nevertheless highly
interesting.

The whole early architecture of Venice is architecture of incrustation:
this has not been enough noticed in its peculiar relation to that of the
rest of Italy. There is, indeed, much incrusted architecture throughout
Italy, in elaborate ecclesiastical work, but there is more which is
frankly of brick, or thoroughly of stone. But the Venetian habitually
incrusted his work with nacre; he built his houses, even the meanest, as
if he had been a shell-fish,--roughly inside, mother-of-pearl on the
surface: he was content, perforce, to gather the clay of the Brenta
banks, and bake it into brick for his substance of wall; but he overlaid
it with the wealth of ocean, with the most precious foreign marbles. You
might fancy early Venice one wilderness of brick, which a petrifying sea
had beaten upon till it coated it with marble: at first a dark
city--washed white by the sea foam. And I told you before that it was
also a city of shafts and arches, and that its dwellings were raised
upon continuous arcades, among which the sea waves wandered. Hence the
thoughts of its builders were early and constantly directed to the
incrustation of arches.

[Illustration: Fig. LVII.]

Sec. XII. In Fig. LVII. I have given two of these Byzantine stilted
arches: the one on the right, _a_, as they now too often appear, in its
bare brickwork; that on the left, with its alabaster covering, literally
marble defensive armor, riveted together in pieces, which follow the
contours of the building. Now, on the wall, these pieces are mere flat
slabs cut to the arch outline; but under the soffit of the arch the
marble mail is curved, often cut singularly thin, like bent tiles, and
fitted together so that the pieces would sustain each other eve