by Greek artists. Its later portions, with the single exception of the
seventeenth century mosaics, have been so dexterously accommodated to
the original fabric that the general effect is still that of a Byzantine
building; and I shall not, except when it is absolutely necessary,
direct attention to the discordant points, or weary the reader with
anatomical criticism. Whatever in St. Mark's arrests the eye, or affects
the feelings, is either Byzantine, or has been modified by Byzantine
influence; and our inquiry into its architectural merits need not
therefore be disturbed by the anxieties of antiquarianism, or arrested
by the obscurities of chronology.

SECTION X. And now I wish that the reader, before I bring him into St.
Mark's Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet English
cathedral town, and walk with me to the west front of its cathedral. Let
us go together up the more retired street, at the end of which we can
see the pinnacles of one of the towers, and then through the low gray
gateway, with its battlemented top and small latticed window in the
centre, into the inner private-looking road or close, where nothing goes
in but the carts of the tradesmen who supply the bishop and the chapter,
and where there are little shaven grass-plots, fenced in by neat rails,
before old-fashioned groups of somewhat diminutive and excessively trim
houses, with little oriel and bay windows jutting out here and there,
and deep wooden cornices and eaves painted cream color and white, and
small porches to their doors in the shape of cockle-shells, or little,
crooked, thick, indescribable wooden gables warped a little on one side;
and so forward till we come to larger houses, also old-fashioned, but of
red brick, and with gardens behind them, and fruit walls, which show
here and there, among the nectarines, the vestiges of an old cloister
arch or shaft, and looking in front on the cathedral square itself, laid
out in rigid divisions of smooth grass and gravel walk, yet not