this strange and
unfailing delight, felt in a thing so simple. It is not often that any
idea of utility has power to enhance the true impressions of beauty; but
it is possible that the enormous importance of the art of weaving to
mankind may give some interest, if not actual attractiveness, to any
type or image of the invention to which we owe, at once, our comfort and
our pride. But the more profound reason lies in the innate love of
mystery and unity; in the joy that the human mind has in contemplating
any kind of maze or entanglement, so long as it can discern, through its
confusion, any guiding clue or connecting plan: a pleasure increased and
solemnized by some dim feeling of the setting forth, by such symbols, of
the intricacy, and alternate rise and fall, subjection and supremacy, of
human fortune; the

"Weave the warp, and weave the woof,"

of Fate and Time.

[Illustration: Plate IX.
LILY CAPITAL OF ST. MARKS.]

Sec. XXIII. But be this as it may, the fact is that we are never tired
of contemplating this woven involution; and that, in some degree, the
sublime pleasure which we have in watching the branches of trees, the
intertwining of the grass, and the tracery of the higher clouds, is
owing to it, not less than that which we receive from the fine meshes of
the robe, the braiding of the hair, and the various glittering of the
linked net or wreathed chain. Byzantine ornamentation, like that of
almost all nations in a state of progress, is full of this kind of work:
but it occurs most conspicuously, though most simply, in the minute
traceries which surround their most solid capitals; sometimes merely in
a reticulated veil, as in the tenth figure in the Plate, sometimes
resembling a basket, on the edges of which are perched birds and other
animals. The diamonded ornament in the eleventh figure is substituted
for it in the Casa Loredan, and marks a somewhat later time and a
tendency to the ordinary Gothic chequer; but the capitals which show it
most definitely are those already so often spoken of as the lily
capitals of St. Mark's, of which the northern one is carefully drawn in
Plate IX.

[Illustration: Plate X.
THE FOUR VENETIAN FLOWER ORDERS.]

Sec. XXIV. These capitals, called barbarous by our architects, are without
exception the most subtle pieces of composition in broad contour which I
have ever met with in architecture. Their profile is given in the
opposite Plate X.