The distressing state of ruin or neglect into which many of the tombs and mosques, so beautified, have been reduced or permitted to fall greatly detracts from their effect, although not without its charm to the painter’s eye and it is refreshing to see them, as at Constantinople, in a somewhat better state of preservation. In that city there is excellent work of this kind in the old palace of the Seraglio, where the writer noticed tiles remarkable for their size and for the perfection of their manufacture. Some of these, nearly two feet square, are covered with the most elegant arabesque diapering of foliage and flowers intertwined, among which birds and insects are depicted. These may probably have been the work of a Persian potter. But it is in the tomb of Soliman the great, built in 1544, that the effect of this mode of decoration can be studied to better advantage. Here the entire walls of the interior are faced with tiles of admirable diaper patterns, within borders of equal elegance, adapted to the form of the wall which they panel and following the subtle outlines of the window openings, which, filled in with gem-like coloured glass between their intricate tracery, produce an effect of the greatest richness and harmony. The application of glazed pottery for decorating wall surface seems never to have taken root in Greece or Italy (although slabs of glass of various colours were used by the Romans for that purpose), where Mosaic had established itself long anterior to the advance of oriental influence; and even in the most palmy days of the production of Italian majolica and painted pottery, nothing of this kind was attempted by her artists beyond an occasional flooring--with the exception of Luca della Robbia, who not only covered ceilings with tiles between the relievo subjects on the spandrils and the centre, as seen at San Miniato and the Pazzi chapel at Santa Croce in Florence, but executed roundels and arch fillings of tiles, painted with subjects on the flat surface. Germany made great use of tiles for facing stoves and other purposes in the sixteenth century, but their inspiration was not oriental; and, again, the Dutch tiles, much used in England during the last century, are well known but ornamented on a false principle of decorative art. In the Indian court of the international exhibition of 1871 were examples of Zenana windows and wall tiles from Sinde, of recent manufacture, and of precisely similar character in body and glaze to the class of wares now under consideration. They, moreover, show another mode of decoration, known as “_pâte sur pâte_,” in which the design is painted on the surface of the clay in a slip or “_engobe_” of lighter colour underneath the glaze; a manner of ornamentation found upon early Chinese porcelain, and upon that ascribed by M. Jacquemart to Persia.