I use the word 'founded' in a literal as well as figurative sense. While the merchants, in their year of victories, threw down the walls of the war-towers, they as eagerly and diligently set their best craftsmen to lift higher the walls of their churches. For the most part, the Early Norman or Basilican forms were too low to please them in their present enthusiasm. Their pride, as well as their piety, desired that these stones of their temples might be goodly; and all kinds of junctions, insertions, refittings, and elevations were undertaken; which, the genius of the people being always for mosaic, are so perfectly executed, and mix up twelfth and thirteenth century work in such intricate harlequinade, that it is enough to drive a poor antiquary wild. 138. I have here in my hand, however, a photograph of a small church, which shows you the change at a glance, and attests it in a notable manner. You know Hubert of Lucca was the first captain of the Florentine people, and the march in which they struck their florin on the pine trunk was through Lucca, on Pisa. Now here is a little church in Lucca, of which the lower half of the façade is of the twelfth century, and the top, built by the Florentines, in the thirteenth, and sealed for their own by two fleur-de-lys, let into its masonry. The most important difference, marking the date, is in the sculpture of the heads which carry the archivolts. But the most palpable difference is in the Cyclopean simplicity of irregular bedding in the lower story; and the delicate bands of alternate serpentine and marble, which follow the horizontal or couchant placing of the stones above. 139. Those of you who, interested in English Gothic, have visited Tuscany, are, I think, always offended at first, if not in permanence, by these horizontal stripes of her marble walls. Twenty-two years ago I quoted, in vol. i. of the "Stones of Venice," Professor Willis's statement that "a practice more destructive of architectural grandeur could hardly be conceived;" and I defended my favourite buildings against that judgement, first by actual comparison in the plate opposite the page, of a piece of them with an example of our modern grandeur; secondly, (vol. i., chap. v.,) by a comparison of their aspect with that of the building of the grandest piece of wall in the Alps,--that Matterhorn in which you all have now learned to take some gymnastic interest; and thirdly, (vol. i., chap. xxvi.,) by reference to the use of barred colours, with delight, by Giotto and all subsequent colourists.