architecture or to the impressiveness of the Scripture histories
embodied in its mosaics. That it has a peculiar effect, however slight,
on the popular mind, may perhaps be safely conjectured from the number
of worshippers which it attracts, while the churches of St. Paul and the
Frari, larger in size and more central in position, are left
comparatively empty. [Footnote: The mere warmth of St. Mark's in winter,
which is much greater than that of the other two churches above named,
must, however, be taken into consideration, as one of the most efficient
causes of its being then more frequented.] But this effect is altogether
to be ascribed to its richer assemblage of those sources of influence
which address themselves to the commonest instincts of the human mind,
and which, in all ages and countries, have been more or less employed in
the support of superstition. Darkness and mystery; confused recesses of
building; artificial light employed in small quantity, but maintained
with a constancy which seems to give it a kind of sacredness;
preciousness of material easily comprehended by the vulgar eye; close
air loaded with a sweet and peculiar odor associated only with religious
services, solemn music, and tangible idols or images having popular
legends attached to them,--these, the stage properties of superstition,
which have been from the beginning of the world, and must be to the end
of it, employed by all nations, whether openly savage or nominally
civilized, to produce a false awe in minds incapable of apprehending the
true nature of the Deity, are assembled in St. Mark's to a degree, as
far as I know, unexampled in any other European church. The arts of the
Magus and the Brahmin are exhausted in the animation of a paralyzed
Christianity; and the popular sentiment which these arts excite is to be
regarded by us with no more respect than we should have considered
ourselves justified in rendering to the devotion of the worshippers at
Eleusis, Ellora, or Edfou. [Footnote: I said above that the larger
number of the devotees entered by the "Arabian" porch; the porch, that