the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in
the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation,
and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude
than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into the
grave.

SECTION XXXIX. It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only that
effectual blows can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance.
Destroy its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere
else. This, therefore, will be the final purpose of the following essay.
I shall not devote a fourth section to Palladio, nor weary the reader
with successive chapters of vituperation; but I shall, in my account of
the earlier architecture, compare the forms of all its leading features
with those into which they were corrupted by the Classicalists; and
pause, in the close, on the edge of the precipice of decline, so soon as
I have made its depths discernible. In doing this I shall depend upon
two distinct kinds of evidence:--the first, the testimony borne by
particular incidents and facts to a want of thought or of feeling in the
builders; from which we may conclude that their architecture must be
bad:--the second, the sense, which I doubt not I shall be able to excite
in the reader, of a systematic ugliness in the architecture itself. Of
the first kind of testimony I shall here give two instances, which may
be immediately useful in fixing in the reader's mind the epoch above
indicated for the commencement of decline.

SECTION XL. I must again refer to the importance which I have above
attached to the death of Carlo Zeno and the doge Tomaso Mocenigo. The
tomb of that doge is, as I said, wrought by a Florentine; but it is of
the same general type and feeling as all the Venetian tombs of the
period, and it is one of the last which retains it. The classical