spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst."[4] This is San Marco as it was. Eight centuries had harmed it little; they had but touched the building with a gentle hand and had mellowed its tints into tender harmony; now its new masters, cruel in their kindness, have restored the mosaics and scraped the marbles; now raw blotches and patches of crude color glare out in violent contrast with those parts which, owing to the intricacy of the carved work, or some other reason, it has been found impossible to touch. To look at St. Mark's now is like listening to some symphony by a master of harmony which is played on instruments all out of tune. Photographs, pictures, illustrations of all kinds, have made St. Mark's so familiar to all the world that it is needless to attempt to give any description of its details. It may suffice to say that the cathedral stands on the site of a smaller and older building, in which the relics of St. Mark, the tutelary saint of Venice, had been already enshrined. The present structure was begun about the year 976, and occupied very nearly a century in building. But it is adorned with the spoils of many a classic structure: with columns and slabs of marble and of porphyry and of serpentine, which were hewn from quarries in Greece and Syria, in Egypt and Libya, by the hands of Roman slaves, and decked the palaces and the baths, the temples and the theaters of Roman cities. The inside of St. Mark's is not less strange and impressive, but hardly so attractive as the exterior. It is plain in outline and almost heavy in design, a Greek cross in plan, with a vaulted dome above the center and each arm. Much as the exterior of St. Mark's owes to marble, porphyry, and mosaic, it would be beautiful if constructed only of grey limestone. This could hardly be said of the interior: take away the choice stones from columns and dado and pavement, strip away the crust of mosaic, those richly robed figures on ground of gold, from wall and from vault (for the whole interior is veneered with marbles or mosaics), and only a rather dark, massive building would remain, which would seem rather lower and rather smaller than one had been led to expect.