_Generally._--Some of the exterior was doubtless cased with marble like S. Mark’s; indeed some of the marble plating remained in Salzenberg’s time. “The walls outside (the Anonymous writes) were covered with large and valuable stones.” Where not so incrusted the narrow coursed brickwork showed in thin red lines, almost equalled by the thick joints of the mortar. From this brickwork the marble lattices of the windows, each with its slab at the bottom charged with a cross, shone out fair, and the gray lead of the many domes rose above all, curve on curve in pearly gradation of light. The courts were doubtless closely set with cypresses, like those which now rise about the turbehs on the south side. Many passages in the Byzantine authors show how much beauty of site was regarded as essential for a fair church.[328] Procopius, describing the Church of the Fountain at Constantinople, says, “there was a grove of cypresses in a rich meadow of blooming flowers, a garden abounding in fruit, with a gently bubbling spring of sweet water, everything suggested the site of a church.” CHAPTER X BUILDING FORMS AND THE BUILDERS § 1. ORIGINS. It may be well to say a few words on the growth of the Byzantine architecture, of which Justinian’s church is the perfect flower. This building is often spoken of as if it were at once the first and the maturest essay in this great style, but this we might know would have been impossible, even though the links that led up to it were lost, which is not entirely the case. It is perfectly true, however, as Mr. Morris says, that “the style leaps into sudden completeness in this most lovely building.” The new wants of the Church soon evolved the complete Christian basilica, which, it has been said must have been in the mind of the writer of the Apocalypse as the type of the entire arrangement of the altar, the twenty-four elders, and the great congregation, in his vision of the heavenly worship. In the time of Constantine, and in Rome, alongside of work which was entirely classic, the churches, with fewer ties to the past to limit development along truly rational lines, had developed a manner which was a more direct outcome of the necessities of building with a minimum of merely perfunctory “architectural” forms--those conventions for the thoughtless expenditure of the workers’ labour, which in still worse times make architecture a burden to them instead of a delight.