Altogether this is a church beyond most others suggestive of worship. Other churches sometimes suggest the same feeling either by enormous size or vast height. At Köln or Milan man feels so small and so contemptible in comparison with the vastness of his own work that he is subdued in spite of himself. In countless other great Gothic minsters the same feeling is produced. But at S. Mark’s it is produced in an intensified degree, and by a building the scale of which is in every way small, if not almost insignificant. There is no long vista of arches, no complicated perspective, and no vast height to awe the beholder, yet the mystery of colour does for it even more than the mystery of size does for Köln or Beauvais, Milan, Toledo, or Bourges. It is, therefore, emphatically a church for worship, one in which even the most careless treads with hushed footstep and bated breath, and where, in spite of crowds, an aweful silence seems always to reign supreme save when it is broken by the religious sound of the services of the church. The ground plan is no doubt known to most of my readers. It is a typical example of the Greek or Eastern church as distinguished from the Romanesque, a cross whose arms are not far from equal, covered by a series of cupolas, one in the centre, one to each of the three eastern arms, and two to the western--with aisles to the nave and choir, and a cloister round the north, west, and south sides of the nave, of which the two former are the porches, and the latter the baptistery of the church.[29] Under the eastern limb of the cross is a crypt, which has in recent years been opened and drained, and is now always open to inspection. This is divided under the choir into five aisles in width by a multitude of small shafts carrying quadripartite vaults, and in the centre of which just under the choir altar, is the shrine of S. Mark. Another apse is formed under the south aisle of the choir, and under the north aisle is a corresponding crypt save that there is no apse to it. Much modernized as this has been in the course of repair, and entirely devoid of all colour or decoration as it is, it is still full of character, and adds largely to the interest of the church. [Illustration: GROUND PLAN--S. MARK, VENICE.]