nd cornices. If any architect ventures to blame such an arrangement,
let him look at our much vaunted early English piers in Salisbury
Cathedral or Westminster Abbey, where the small satellitic shafts are
introduced in the same gratuitous manner, but with far less excuse or
reason: for those small shafts have nothing but their delicacy and
purely theoretical connection with the archivolt mouldings to recommend
them; but the St. Mark's shafts have an intrinsic beauty and value of
the highest order, and the object of the whole system of architecture,
as above stated, is in great part to set forth the beauty and value of
the shaft itself. Now, not only is this accomplished by withdrawing it
occasionally from servile work, but the position here given to it,
within three or four inches of a wall from which it nevertheless stands
perfectly clear all the way up, is exactly that which must best display
its color and quality. When there is much vacant space left behind a
pillar, the shade against which it is relieved is comparatively
indefinite, the eye passes by the shaft, and penetrates into the
vacancy. But when a broad surface of wall is brought near the shaft, its
own shadow is, in almost every effect of sunshine, so sharp and dark as
to throw out its colors with the highest possible brilliancy; if there
be no sunshine, the wall veil is subdued and varied by the most subtle
gradations of delicate half shadow, hardly less advantageous to the
shaft which it relieves. And, as far as regards pure effect in open air
(all artifice of excessive darkness or mystery being excluded), I do not
know anything whatsoever in the whole compass of the European
architecture I have seen, which can for a moment be compared with the
quaint shade and delicate color, like that of Rembrandt and Paul
Veronese united, which the sun brings out, as his rays move from porch
to porch along the St. Mark's facade.

And, as if to prove that this was indeed the builder's intention, and
that he did not leave his shafts idle merely because he did not know how
to set them to work safely, there are two pieces of masonry at the
extremities of the facade, which are just as remarkable for their frank
trust in the bearing power of the shafts as the rest are for their want
of confidence in them. But, before we come to these, we must say a word
or two respecting the second point named above, the superior position of
the shafts.

It was assuredly not in the builder's