gilded, and embalmed repose: it, with the religion it expressed; and so
would have remained for ever,--so _does_ remain, where its languor has
been undisturbed. [Footnote: The reader will find the _weak_ points of
Byzantine architecture shrewdly seized, and exquisitely sketched, in the
opening chapter of the most delightful book of travels I ever opened,--
Curzon's "Monasteries of the Levant."] But rough wakening was ordained.

Section XXI. This Christian art of the declining empire is divided into
two great branches, western and eastern; one centred at Rome, the other
at Byzantium, of which the one is the early Christian Romanesque,
properly so called, and the other, carried to higher imaginative
perfection by Greek workmen, is distinguished from it as Byzantine. But
I wish the reader, for the present, to class these two branches of art
together in his mind, they being, in points of main importance, the
same; that is to say, both of them a true continuance and sequence of
the art of old Rome itself, flowing uninterruptedly down from the
fountain-head, and entrusted always to the best workmen who could be
found--Latins in Italy and Greeks in Greece; and thus both branches may
be ranged under the general term of Christian Romanesque, an
architecture which had lost the refinement of Pagan art in the
degradation of the empire, but which was elevated by Christianity to
higher aims, and by the fancy of the Greek workmen endowed with brighter
forms. And this art the reader may conceive as extending in its various
branches over all the central provinces of the empire, taking aspects
more or less refined, according to its proximity to the seats of
government; dependent for all its power on the vigor and freshness of
the religion which animated it; and as that vigor and purity departed,
losing its own vitality, and sinking into nerveless rest, not deprived
of its beauty, but benumbed and incapable of advance or change.