PLATE 1. Temperance and Intemperance in Ornament, 6 " 2. Gothic Capitals, 8 " 3. Noble and Ignoble Grotesque, 125 " 4. Mosaic of Olive Tree and Flowers, 179 " 5. Byzantine Bases, 225 " 6. Byzantine Jambs, 229 " 7. Gothic Jambs, 230 " 8. Byzantine Archivolts, 244 " 9. Gothic Archivolts, 245 " 10. Cornices, 248 " 11. Tracery Bars, 252 " 12. Capitals of Fondaco de Turchi, 304 THE STONES OF VENICE. THIRD, OR RENAISSANCE, PERIOD. CHAPTER I. EARLY RENAISSANCE. § I. I trust that the reader has been enabled, by the preceding chapters, to form some conception of the magnificence of the streets of Venice during the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Yet by all this magnificence she was not supremely distinguished above the other cities of the middle ages. Her early edifices have been preserved to our times by the circuit of her waves; while continual recurrences of ruin have defaced the glory of her sister cities. But such fragments as are still left in their lonely squares, and in the corners of their streets, so far from being inferior to the buildings of Venice, are even more rich, more finished, more admirable in invention, more exuberant in beauty. And although, in the North of Europe, civilization was less advanced, and the knowledge of the arts was more confined to the ecclesiastical orders, so that, for domestic architecture, the period of perfection must be there placed much later than in Italy, and considered as extending to the middle of the fifteenth century; yet, as each city reached a certain point in civilization, its streets became decorated with the same magnificence, varied only in style according to the materials at hand, and temper of the people. And I am not aware of any town of wealth and importance in the middle ages, in which some proof does not exist, that, at its period of greatest energy and prosperity, its streets were inwrought with rich sculpture, and even (though in this, as before noticed, Venice always stood supreme) glowing with color and with gold. Now, therefore, let the reader,--forming for himself as vivid and real a conception as he is able, either of a group of Venetian palaces in the fourteenth century, or, if he likes better, of one of the more fantastic but even richer street scenes of Rouen, Antwerp, Cologne, or Nuremberg, and keeping this gorgeous image before him,--go out into any thoroughfare, representative, in a general and characteristic way, of the feeling for domestic architecture in modern times; let him, for instance, if in London, walk once up and down Harley Street, or Baker