teenth and
sixteenth; and the modern portion of the mosaics to the seventeenth.

This, however, I only wish him to recollect in order that I may speak
generally of the Byzantine architecture of St. Mark's, without leading
him to suppose the whole church to have been built and decorated by
Greek artists. Its later portions, with the single exception of the
seventeenth-century mosaics, have been so dexterously accommodated to
the original fabric that the general effect is still that of a
Byzantine building; and I shall not, except when it is absolutely
necessary, direct attention to the discordant points, or weary the
reader with anatomical criticism. Whatever in St. Mark's arrests the
eye, or affects the feelings, is either Byzantine, or has been modified
by Byzantine influence; and our inquiry into its architectural merits
need not therefore be disturbed by the anxieties of antiquarianism, or
arrested by the obscurities of chronology.

And now I wish that the reader, before I bring him into St. Mark's
Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet English
cathedral town, and walk with me to the west front of its cathedral.
Let us go together up the more retired street, at the end of which we
can see the pinnacles of one of the towers, and then through the low
grey gateway, with its battlemented top and small latticed window in
the centre, into the inner private-looking road or close, where nothing
goes in but the carts of the tradesmen who supply the bishop and the
chapter, and where there are little shaven grass-plots, fenced in by
neat rails, before old-fashioned groups of somewhat diminutive and
excessively trim houses, with little oriel and bay windows jutting out
here and there, and deep wooden cornices and eaves painted cream colour
and white, and small porches to their doors in the shape of
cockle-shells, or little, crooked, thick, indescribable wooden gables
warped a little on one side; and so forward till we come to larger
houses, also old-fashioned, but of red brick, and with gardens behind
them, and fruit walls, which show here and there, among the nectarines,
the vestiges of an old cloister arch or shaft, and looking in front on
the cathedral square itself, laid out in rigid divisions of smooth
grass and gravel walk, yet not uncheerful, especially on the sunny
side, where the canons' children are walking with their nursery-maids.
And so, taking care not to tread on the grass, we will go along the