_alive_,
and fiercely alive too, all impatience and spring: the Byzantine birds
peck idly at the fruit, and the animals hardly touch it with their
noses. The cinque cento birds in Venice hold it up daintily, like
train-bearers; the birds in the earlier Gothic peck at it hungrily and
naturally; but the Lombard beasts gripe at it like tigers, and tear it
off with writhing lips and glaring eyes. They are exactly like Jip with
the bit of geranium, worrying imaginary cats in it."

The notice of the leaf in the above extract is important,--it is the
vine-leaf; used constantly both by Byzantines and Lombards, but by the
latter with especial frequency, though at this time they were hardly
able to indicate what they meant. It forms the most remarkable
generality of the St. Michele decoration; though, had it not luckily
been carved on the facade, twining round a stake, and with grapes, I
should never have known what it was meant for, its general form being a
succession of sharp lobes, with incised furrows to the point of each.
But it is thrown about in endless change; four or five varieties of it
might be found on every cluster of capitals: and not content with this,
the Lombards hint the same form even in their griffin wings. They love
the vine very heartily.

In St. Michele of Lucca we have perhaps the noblest instance in Italy of
the Lombard spirit in its later refinement. It is some four centuries
later than St. Michele of Pavia, and the method of workmanship is
altogether different. In the Pavian church, nearly all the ornament is
cut in a coarse sandstone, in bold relief: a darker and harder stone (I
think, not serpentine, but its surface is so disguised by the lustre of
ages that I could not be certain) is used for the capitals of the
western door, which are especially elaborate in their sculpture;--two
devilish apes, or apish devils, I know not which, with bristly
moustaches and edgy teeth, half-crouching, with their hands
impertinently on their knees, ready for a spit or a spring if one goes
near them; but all is pure bossy sculpture; there is no inlaying, except
of some variegated tiles in the shape of saucers set concave (an
ornament used also very gracefully in St. Jacopo of Bologna): and the
whole surface of the church is enriched with the massy reliefs, well
preserved everywhere above the reach of human animals, but utterly
destroyed to some five or six feet from the ground; worn away into large
cellular hollows a