No subject in the whole history of architecture is so remarkable, or would more richly repay the investigator. I commend it to your individual study, and will only add that our own country is more rich in the variety of its vaulting than any other, and that London is especially well supplied with objects of study, containing, as it does, excellent examples of nearly every variety of vaulting, from the stern severity of the work of King Edward the Confessor in the substructures of his monastic buildings at Westminster, to that gorgeous and astonishing work which I have just been describing, and of which we may boldly assert (whatever may be our individual preferences), that _the world does not contain its equal_. LECTURE XVI. The Dome. Non-existence of the Dome in our old English architecture--Highly developed forms in France, Germany, and Italy, contemporary with our great Mediæval edifices--Suggestions for its introduction into our revived and redeveloped Neo-mediæval style--So-called Tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenæ--The Pantheon--Temple of Minerva Medica--Torre dei Schiavi--Temples of Vesta at Rome and Tivoli--Temple of Jupiter in Diocletian’s Palace, Spalatro--Tomb of St. Constantia--Baptistery at Nocera--Baptistery at Ravenna--Important domical development--“Pendentive Domes”--Early specimens--Pendentive domes the special characteristic of the Byzantine style--How this originated--Further domical developments--Cathedral at Florence--Churches of SS. Sergius and Bacchus, the Apostles, and St. Sophia, Constantinople. It has been my lot to deliver my lectures from this chair in groups so very detached from one another, as to render it impossible for my hearers to follow them as a continuous series. In spite, however, of this disadvantage, I purpose to make my present lecture form a natural sequence to the last which I had the pleasure of delivering three years ago. My last course was on arched construction, and my last lectures were on vaulting. My present one will carry on the same subject into its culminating development--THE DOME. Strongly as my tendencies towards our own Mediæval architecture draw me towards the modes of vaulting which prevail in our own ancient buildings, and which formed the subject of my later lectures, I am bound to admit that the noblest of all forms by which a space can be covered is the dome; and, much more than this, that of all architectural forms it is the most sublime and the most poetic, and is susceptible of, and demands, the highest artistic treatment. I deplore, therefore, its non-existence in our old English architecture.