The great hall of audience of the Byzantine emperors was surmounted by a cupola. Two Councils of the Church, in 680 and 692, were held in it, and obtained their designation _in Trullo_ from this fact. From the royal palace the cupola passed to the church, as the crown of the House of the King of Kings; and a dome was erected over the church of the Holy Sepulchre by Constantine, and over the church of the Eternal Wisdom by Justinian. But it had already been employed as the crown of a temple, not only in the Pantheon at Rome, but in the Tholos, the temple of Marnas or Dagon at Gaza. The great dome or umbrella by no means excluded the lesser one beneath it, and kings’ thrones under cupolas were also over-canopied by structures of wood, or marble, or metal. Such a _baldacchino_ is seen over the sun-god in a bas-relief at Sippar. It became common, and when of wood or metal, was sculptured, or when of textile work, was embroidered with leaf and flower-work, retaining a reminiscence of the original tree beneath which the king sat and held court. It also passed to the church, and became a subsidiary umbrella over the altar. Paul the Silentiary in the sixth century describes that in the Church of St. Sophia at Constantinople as a dome resting on four silver pillars. Constantine erected much the same sort of domed covering above the tomb of the Apostles in Rome. In the catacombs, the vaulted chapels and the over-arched recessed tombs are all attributable to the same idea; nor has the original notion been lost in them, for they are frescoed over with vines, bays, and other foliage. The most beautiful instance is also the earliest, the squire crypt in the cemetery of Prætextatus, which dates from the second century. Here the entire vault is covered with trailing tendrils and leaves with birds perched on them. A couple of centuries later the original idea was gone, and we find, instead of a growing tree, only bunches and sprigs of flowers. So!--the umbrellas that pass in the rain under the shadow of the mighty dome of St. Paul’s are its poor relations, and my flower-wreathed _regenschirm_ preserves in its leafage a reminiscence of the original tree; and the old German woman sits and vends carrots under what was once the prerogative of the sovereign. Is this not a token that sovereignty has passed from the despot to the democracy?[25] VII. Dolls. A white marble sarcophagus occupies the centre of one of the rooms on the basement of the Capitoline Museum in Rome. The cover has been taken off and a sheet of glass fastened over the coffin, so that one can look in. The sarcophagus contains the bones and dust of a little girl. Her ornaments, the flowers that wreathed the poor little head, are all there, and by the side is the child’s wooden doll, precisely like the dolls made and sold to-day. [Illustration: _Fig. 33._--DOLL OF IVORY, FROM THE CATACOMB OF ST. AGNESE.]