Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval! There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them; for instead of the restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable-winged, drifting on the bleak upper air, the St. Mark's porches are full of doves, that nestle among the marble foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their living plumes, changing at every motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, that have stood unchanged for seven hundred years. And what effect has this splendor on those who pass beneath it? You may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the gateway of St. Mark's, and you will not see an eye lifted to it, nor a countenance brightened by it. Priest and layman, soldier and civilian, rich and poor, pass by it alike regardlessly. Up to the very recesses of the porches, the meanest tradesmen of the city push their counters; nay, the foundations of its pillars are themselves the seats, not "of them that sell doves" for sacrifice, but of the venders of toys and caricatures. Round the whole square in front of the church there is almost a continuous line of cafes, where the idle Venetians of the middle classes lounge and read empty journals; in its center the Austrian bands play during the time of vespers their martial music jarring with the organ notes--the march drowning the miserere and the sullen crowd thickening round them--a crowd which if it had its will would stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards; and unregarded children--every heavy glance of their young eyes full of desperation and stony depravity and their throats hoarse with cursing--gamble and fight and snarl and sleep, hour after hour, clashing their bruised _centesimi_ upon the marble ledges of the church porch. And the images of Christ and his angels look down upon it continually. That we may not enter the church out of the midst of the horror of this, let us turn aside under the portico which looks toward the sea, and passing round within the two massive pillars brought from St. Jean d'Acre,[40] we shall find the gate of the baptistery: let us enter there. The heavy door closes behind us instantly; and the light and the turbulence of the Piazzetta are together shut out by it. [Footnote 40: More commonly known as Acre, a seaport on the Palestine coast, captured by Crusaders in 1104, by Saladin in 1187, and recaptured by the Crusaders in 1191. It was thenceforth held by the Christians for exactly one hundred years, when it became the last Christian stronghold in Palestine to yield. In 1797 Acre was successfully defended by Sir Sidney Smith against Napoleon.]