, provided I am ready to allow a French architect to
speak of the six or seven, or eight, or seventy or eighty, orders of
Norman windows, if so many are distinguishable; and so also we may
rationally speak, for the sake of intelligibility, of the five
orders of Greek pillars, provided only we understand that there may
be five millions of orders as good or better, of pillars _not_
Greek.

[85] Or in their own curves; as, on a small scale, in the balustrade
fig. 6, Plate XIII., above.

[86] For all details of this kind, the reader is referred to the
final Appendix in Vol. III.

[87] Two threads of white marble, each about an inch wide, inlaid in
the dark grey pavement, indicate the road to the Rialto from the
farthest extremity of the north quarter of Venice. The peasant or
traveller, lost in the intricacy of the pathway in this portion of
the city, cannot fail, after a few experimental traverses, to cross
these white lines, which thenceforward he has nothing to do but to
follow, though their capricious sinuosities will try his patience
not a little.

[88] An account of the conspiracy of Bajamonte may be found in
almost any Venetian history; the reader may consult Mutinelli,
Annali Urbani, lib. iii.

[89] See account of series of capitals in final Appendix.

[90] If the traveller desire to find them (and they are worth
seeking), let him row from the Fondamenta S. Biagio down the Rio
della Tana, and look, on his right, for a low house with windows in
it like those in the woodcut No. XXXI. above, p. 256. Let him go in
at the door of the portico in the middle of this house, and he will
find himself in a small alley, with the windows in question on each
side of him.

[91] The bitterness of feeling with which the Venetians must have
remembered this, was probably the cause of their magnificent heroism
in the final siege of the city under Dandolo, and, partly, of the
excesses which disgraced their victory. The conduct of the allied
army of the Crusaders on this occasion cannot, however, be brought
in evidence of general barbarism in the thirteenth century: first,
because the masses of the crusading armies were in great part
composed of the refuse of the nations of Europe; and secondly,
because such a mode of argument might lead us to inconvenient
conclusions respecting ourselves,