must view them as part and parcel of the work in which they are personally concerned; and then, but not till then, shall we see a satisfactory school of architects in England. The interest of S. Mark’s is not, however, only religious and artistic; on other grounds it is certainly one of the buildings most worthy of study in all Europe. Its architecture is purely Byzantine; and whether its design was derived from Constantinople or from Alexandria, it presents us with an almost unique example of the architecture of the Eastern church transplanted almost without alteration to the domains of the Western. Nor is this all. It played no small part in modifying the distinctly Roman influence by which otherwise the whole of Northern Europe would have been affected. When we see a church so far from S. Mark’s as that of S. Front at Périgueux modelled after it, and in its turn influencing a vast number of churches in that and the neighbouring districts, we may realize what S. Mark’s did towards the development of Romanesque into new forms and combinations, and may then value properly every portion of its fabric. Byzantine architecture was the development of Greek art in the hands of the then vigorous and active Eastern Church. It is not a direct reproduction therefore of Classic art which is to be seen in S. Mark’s, but one stage of a development the influence of which--partly owing to the effect of commerce, partly to her isolation--was largely felt, down to the very last days of active Venetian artistic life. This has been well condensed in a short sentence by Mr. Ruskin. “All European architecture,” he says, “good and bad, old and new, is derived from Greece through Rome, and coloured and perfected from the East. The Doric and Corinthian orders are the roots, the one of all Romanesque buildings--Norman, Lombard, Byzantine; the other of all Gothic--Early English, French, German, and Tuscan. The old Greeks gave the shaft, Rome gave the arch. The Arabs pointed and foliated the arch.” But in the colouring and perfecting the church of S. Mark had the lion’s share, just as in the ground-plan it is to Venice and the East that we owe the cruciform arrangement of so many of our buildings, instead of the basilican form to which we might otherwise have been condemned. There is another respect in which S. Mark’s is extremely Eastern. This is in the almost entire absence of figure-sculpture in its original construction. The subjects and figures on the columns of the baldachin are too delicate to be noticed from a distance, and it was not until A.D. 1394 that the choir-screen was introduced, with figures of the Apostles on either side of the rood, erected no doubt to supply a want which had been long felt before it was gratified. At the same time figures were added in niches between the gables of the exterior, but even now they form a small and inconsiderable part of the decoration of the church.