But if this Cathedral is small, it has the proper beauty of minute art; it is covered with rich decoration. All its surfaces show carved fragments not only of classical, but of earlier Byzantine work—friezes, reliefs, inscriptions, capitals—all so disposed with a general correspondence or symmetry as to produce the effect of a real design. Moreover, this foreign ornament is set in a building strictly Byzantine in form, with its rich doorway, its tiny windows with their high semicircular arches supported on delicate capitals, and toned by the centuries of Attic dust to that rich gold brown which has turned the Parthenon from marble almost to ruddy gold. Never was there greater harmony and unity attained by the most deliberate patch-work. In the earlier works on Byzantine art, this church was confidently assigned to the sixth century. Buchon found upon it the arms of La Roche and of Villehardouin, so that he assigned it to the thirteenth. The character of the other buildings of these knights makes me doubt that they and their friends could have constructed such a church—the Western monks then built Latin churches in Greece—and I suppose that the arms, which I could not find, were only carved by the Franks upon the existing building. But I will not therefore subscribe to the sixth-century theory. Of the remaining churches three only, the Kapnikarea, the Virgin of the Monastery, and S. Theodore, are worth studying, as specimens of the typical form of such buildings. The main plan is a square, surmounted by a cupola supported on four pillars, with a corridor or porch on the West side, and three polygonal apses on the East. Lesser cupolas often surround the central dome. The height and slenderness of this central dome is probably the clearest sign of comparative lateness in these buildings, which used to be attributed to the fourth and fifth centuries, but are now degraded to the eleventh. The earliest form is no doubt that of the massive S. George’s at Salonica—a huge Rotunda covered with a flat dome, not unlike the Pantheon at Rome, with nothing but richly ornamented niches, and a splendid mosaic ceiling in the dome, to give relief to a very plain design. The successive complications and refinements added to this simple structure may be studied even in the later churches of Salonica.