In the practice of carving, as in that of moulding, I see no reason for yielding the palm to the Venetian. It is true indeed, that the Byzantine capitals--of which such magnificent examples exist at S. Mark’s--are some of the most exquisite I have ever seen, true and precise in their sculpture, revelling in the utmost delicacy of intricate work, and always refined and elaborated with great evidence of care and thoughtfulness; but after the earliest school, and those later examples in which they were copied and regarded as models, there appears to me to be much less to admire. There is a confusion and want of fixed purpose about many of those which are commonly referred to as the best types of Gothic sculpture, which is at best not satisfactory; and I confess that I came away much more pleased with some of the Byzantine capitals than with any others. They have some notable points of difference from those to which we are used. They are generally much larger in proportion to the shaft than ours; and instead of having a regular neck-moulding, they rise out of the shaft with a kind of swell, which, as being less definite, is to me less satisfactory than our neck-moulding. The capitals of all dates are very generally similar in their outlines--this in part arising from the constant occurrence of circular columns with capitals whose abaci are square, and in part from the imitation, more or less closely, of Byzantine models. Indeed, it is impossible not to see how great an influence the earliest remaining work--that of the eleventh century--had in Venice until the end of the fourteenth and far into the fifteenth century; the most beautiful and striking arrangements of the former age are reproduced and only slightly modified in the finest work of the latter to a very remarkable extent: and so much more decidedly and frequently than are the traces, in northern pointed, of any hankering after the features of Romanesque buildings, that I think but one conclusion can fairly be drawn from the sculpture of Venice as well as from its architecture, viz. that pointed architecture was never developed as purely and thoroughly in Venice as in the North of Europe; and that, though it retained its sway there nearly as long as it did elsewhere, it never thoroughly understood or felt its own strength, and worked and toiled tied down and encumbered by Byzantine fetters and Classic sympathies. There is much, notwithstanding this, to admire--and, above all else, the greatest beauty of the style, wherein it so far left us behind, the thorough appreciation and unsparing use of the shaft. It is quite astonishing how very little this was ever used in England. Occasionally, indeed, it was freely used in grand buildings, and in some individual features it was frequently seen in thirteenth-century buildings; but at the very period when, if ever, architecture was in its perfection--in the early part of the fourteenth century--it was almost entirely forgotten and thrown aside.