epose, in the earlier style, or of Imaginative
Activity in the latter, definite or trustworthy. We much question
whether the Duomo of Verona, with its advanced guard of haughty
gryphons--the mailed peers of Charlemagne frowning from its vaulted
gate,--that vault itself ribbed with variegated marbles, and peopled by
a crowd of monsters---the Evangelical types not the least stern or
strange; its stringcourses replaced by flat cut friezes, combats between
gryphons and chain-clad paladins, stooping behind their triangular
shields and fetching sweeping blows with two-handled swords; or that of
Lucca--its fantastic columns clasped by writhing snakes and winged
dragons, their marble scales spotted with inlaid serpentine, every
available space alive with troops of dwarfish riders, with spur on heel
and hawk in hood, sounding huge trumpets of chase, like those of the
Swiss Urus-horn, and cheering herds of gaping dogs upon harts and hares,
boars and wolves, every stone signed with its grisly beast--be one whit
more soothing to the contemplative, or less exciting to the imaginative
faculties, than the successive arch? and visionary shaft, and dreamy
vault, and crisped foliage, and colorless stone, of our own fair abbeys,
checkered with sunshine through the depth of ancient branches, or seen
far off, like clouds in the valley, risen out of the pause of its river.

40. And with respect to the more fitful and fantastic expression of the
"Italian Gothic," our author is again to be blamed for his loose
assumption, from the least reflecting of preceding writers, of this
general term, as if the pointed buildings of Italy could in any wise be
arranged in one class, or criticised in general terms. It is true that
so far as the church interiors are concerned, the system is nearly
universal, and always bad; its characteristic features being arches of
enormous span, and banded foliage capitals divided into three fillets,
rude in design, unsuggestive of any structural connection with the
column, and looking consequently as if they might be slipped up or down,
and had been only fastened in their places for the temporary purposes of
a festa. But the exteriors of Italian pointed buildings display
variations of principle and transitions of type quite as bold as either
the advance from the Romanesque to the earliest of their forms, or the
recoil from their latest to the cinque-cento.

41. The first and grandest style resulted merely from the applic