an ancient city of Venice, altogether
different in aspect from that which now exists. From these remains we
may with safety deduce general conclusions touching the forms of
Byzantine architecture, as practised in Eastern Italy, during the
eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries.

Sec. II. They agree in another respect, as well as in style. All are
either ruins, or fragments disguised by restoration. Not one of them is
uninjured or unaltered; and the impossibility of finding so much as an
angle or a single story in perfect condition is a proof, hardly less
convincing than the method of their architecture, that they were indeed
raised during the earliest phases of the Venetian power. The mere
fragments, dispersed in narrow streets, and recognizable by a single
capital, or the segment of an arch, I shall not enumerate: but, of
important remains, there are six in the immediate neighborhood of the
Rialto, one in the Rio di Ca' Foscari, and one conspicuously placed
opposite the great Renaissance Palace known as the Vendramin Calerghi,
one of the few palaces still inhabited[41] and well maintained; and
noticeable, moreover, as having a garden beside it, rich with
evergreens, and decorated by gilded railings and white statues that cast
long streams of snowy reflection down into the deep water. The vista of
canal beyond is terminated by the Church of St. Geremia, another but
less attractive work of the Renaissance; a mass of barren brickwork,
with a dull leaden dome above, like those of our National Gallery. So
that the spectator has the richest and meanest of the late architecture
of Venice before him at once: the richest, let him observe, a piece of
private luxury; the poorest, that which was given to God. Then, looking
to the left, he will see the fragment of the work of earlier ages,
testifying against both, not less by its utter desolation than by the
nobleness of the traces that are still left of it.

Sec. III. It is a ghastly ruin; whatever is venerable or sad in its wreck
being disguised by attempts to put it to present uses of the basest
kind. It has been composed of arcades borne by marble shafts, and walls
of brick faced with marble: but the covering stones have been torn away
from it like the shroud from a corpse; and its walls, rent into a
thousand chasms, are filled and refilled with fresh brickwork, and the
seams and hollows are choked with clay and whitewash, oozing and
trickling over the marble,--itself bl