nto the period of the Renaissance. The words "Peace
be to this house" occur on one side of a Veronese gateway, with the
appropriate and veracious inscription S.P.Q.R., on a Roman standard, on
the other; and "Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord," is
written on one of the doorways of a building added at the flank of the
Casa Barbarigo, in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. It seems to be
only modern Protestantism which is entirely ashamed of _all_ symbols and
words that appear in anywise like a confession of faith.

Sec. LVIII. This peculiar feeling is well worthy of attentive analysis.
It indeed, in most cases, hardly deserves the name of a feeling; for the
meaningless doorway is merely an ignorant copy of heathen models: but
yet, if it were at this moment proposed to any of us, by our architects,
to remove the grinning head of a satyr, or other classical or Palladian
ornament, from the keystone of the door, and to substitute for it a
cross, and an inscription testifying our faith, I believe that most
persons would shrink from the proposal with an obscure and yet
overwhelming sense that things would be sometimes done, and thought,
within the house which would make the inscription on its gate a base
hypocrisy. And if so, let us look to it, whether that strong reluctance
to utter a definite religious profession, which so many of us feel, and
which, not very carefully examining into its dim nature, we conclude to
be modesty, or fear of hypocrisy, or other such form of amiableness, be
not, in very deed, neither less nor more than Infidelity; whether
Peter's "I know not the man" be not the sum and substance of all these
misgivings and hesitations; and whether the shamefacedness which we
attribute to sincerity and reverence, be not such shamefacedness as may
at last put us among those of whom the Son of Man shall be ashamed.

Sec. LIX. Such are the principal circumstances to be noted in the external
form and details of the Gothic palaces; of their interior arrangements
there is little left unaltered. The gateways which we have been
examining almost universally lead, in the earlier palaces, into a long
interior court, round which the mass of the palace is built; and in
which its first story is reached by a superb external staircase,
sustained on four or five pointed arches gradually increasing as they
ascend, both in height and span,--this change in their size being, so
far as I remember, peculiar to Venice, an