"Above this noble work comes the third stage; and I confess, to my eye, with patent marks in every stone of which it is composed that it was designed by some other hand than that which had been so successful below. There is something quite chilling in the great waste of plain, unbroken wall, coming above the extreme richness of the arcades which support it; and moreover this placing of the richer work below and the plainer above is so contrary, not only to all ordinary canons of architecture, but just as much to the ordinary practice of the Venetians, that I feel sure that the impression which I have had from my first acquaintance with drawings of it is substantially correct; viz., that the line at which alterations and additions have been made is to be looked for rather in a _horizontal_ than in a _vertical_ direction; that in all probability, consequently, the builders of 1309 commenced with some portion of the sea-façade, and gradually carried on the greater part of the building to the height of the two stages, as we now see them, leaving the building finished in precisely the same way as the corresponding halls at Padua and Vicenza--two stories in height, with arcades covering the outer walls of the upper as well as of the lower stage; and that when the council chamber was found to be too small and larger rooms were required, another architect suggested the advantage of obtaining them by raising an immense story above the others and without destroying much of his predecessor's work providing rooms on the most magnificent scale for the Doge and his council. [Illustration: PLATE LXX SALA DEL MAGGIOR CONSIGLIO: DUCAL PALACE] "No one can examine the building without seeing that there is, not only in the detail but equally in the general design, a marked difference between the two lower stages and the upper stage. In place of the extreme boldness which marks every part of the former, we see mouldings reduced in the latter to the smallest and meanest section possible; the windows of the upper stage are badly designed, whilst the traceries of the second stage are as fine as they can possibly be; the parapet too is not equal in its design to any of the lower work, and crowns with an insignificant grotesqueness the noble symmetry of the two lower arcades; and finally the chequer-work of marble, which forms the whole of the upper wall, is a mode of construction which I have not seen in any early work, though it is seen in the Porta della Carta, and in other late work.