stream, flows by the lonely spot; mason bees have covered
with laborious stucco-work the scrolls and leafage of its ornaments,
confounding epitaphs and trophies under their mud houses. A few
cypress-trees stand round it, and the dogs and chickens of a
neighbouring farmyard make it their rendezvous. Those mason bees are
like posterity, which settles down upon the ruins of a Baalbec or a
Luxor, setting up its tents, and filling the fair spaces of Hellenic
or Egyptian temples with clay hovels. Nothing differs but the scale;
and while the bees content themselves with filling up and covering,
man destroys the silent places of the past which he appropriates.

In Ravenna itself, perhaps what strikes us most is the abrupt
transition everywhere discernible from monuments of vast antiquity to
buildings of quite modern date. There seems to be no interval between
the marbles and mosaics of Justinian or Theodoric and the
insignificant frippery of the last century. The churches of
Ravenna--S. Vitale, S. Apollinare, and the rest--are too well known,
and have been too often described by enthusiastic antiquaries, to need
a detailed notice in this place. Every one is aware that the
ecclesiastical customs and architecture of the early Church can be
studied in greater perfection here than elsewhere. Not even the
basilicas and mosaics of Rome, nor those of Palermo and Monreale, are
equal for historical interest to those of Ravenna. Yet there is not
one single church which remains entirely unaltered and unspoiled. The
imagination has to supply the atrium or outer portico from one
building, the vaulted baptistery with its marble font from another,
the pulpits and ambones from a third the tribune from a fourth, the
round brick bell-tower from a fifth, and then to cover all the concave
roofs and chapel walls with grave and glittering mosaics.

There is nothing more beautiful in decorative art than the mosaics of
such tiny buildings as the tomb of Galla Placidia or the chapel of the
Bishop's Palace. They are like jewelled and enamelled cases; not an
inch of wall can be seen which is not covered with elaborate patterns
of the brightest colours. Tall date-palms spring from the floor with
fruit and birds among their branches, and between them stand the
pillars and apostles of the Church. In the spandrels and lunettes
above the arches and the windows angels fly with white extended wings.
On every vacant place are scrolls and arabesques of foliage,