Different, however, as is the general aspect of a Byzantine and Romanesque building,--especially when the former assumes its crowning feature, the dome,--it cannot be denied that they are, nevertheless, the same style in two phases; and that there is no such contradiction between them as to forbid their amalgamation to any extent. In proof of this, we have the not incongruous character of the Crusaders’ buildings in the East, in which the dome was not forbidden; the similarity to Romanesque of such of the Byzantine buildings as do not happen to have domes; the introduction into France of the domed architecture by a colony of Greeks; the admission of much that is Byzantine into the Romanesque buildings of Germany; and finally, the very extensive use of purely Byzantine foliage and other forms of ornamentation into the buildings of Western Europe in the twelfth century. This last-named circumstance I have dwelt upon at length in one of my former lectures, and I shall, no doubt, have frequent occasions again to allude to it. The fact is, that the ornamentation of the later examples of the Romanesque style is for the most part rather Byzantine than Roman in its origin: even the acanthus-leaves in the capitals and cornices more resembling those of the monument of Lysicrates than those of any Roman building; while the surface ornaments--so profusely used--are often traceable to the patterns of the various manufactures of the East, so largely imported into Western Europe. Much light has recently been thrown upon the Byzantine style, especially in respect of its secular productions, through the discovery by the Count de Vogüé of a vast number of ruined towns in the mountains of Central Syria, which have remained almost untouched (except by time and earthquakes) just as they were deserted in the seventh century on the approach of the first Mahometan invaders. These remarkable remains give us the connecting link between Classic and Mediæval art, though greatly influenced by the traditional mode of building belonging to Syria. It is a subject which would need a separate lecture to deal with it as it deserves, and I only mention it here for the sake of saying that the carved ornamentation of these remarkable buildings is Greek in its feeling,[1] and not Roman, and that it is evidently allied to that imported at a much later period into Western Europe; and which especially characterises the buildings of the twelfth century in France, and (though less constantly) in England; all tending to establish the essential unity of the round-arched architecture of the early Middle Ages, and the fact that the East and the West were much more united in artistic affinity than has generally been admitted.