soon grew to be so nobly, so augustly ugly, that it was difficult
to stay away from it, even for a little while. Every time its squat
domes disappeared from my view, I had a despondent feeling; whenever
they reappeared, I felt an honest rapture--I have not known any happier
hours than those I daily spent in front of Florian's, looking across the
Great Square at it. Propped on its long row of low thick-legged columns,
its back knobbed with domes, it seemed like a vast warty bug taking a
meditative walk.

St. Mark's is not the oldest building in the world, of course, but it
seems the oldest, and looks the oldest--especially inside.

When the ancient mosaics in its walls become damaged, they are repaired
but not altered; the grotesque old pattern is preserved. Antiquity has
a charm of its own, and to smarten it up would only damage it. One day
I was sitting on a red marble bench in the vestibule looking up at an
ancient piece of apprentice-work, in mosaic, illustrative of the command
to "multiply and replenish the earth." The Cathedral itself had seemed
very old; but this picture was illustrating a period in history which
made the building seem young by comparison. But I presently found an
antique which was older than either the battered Cathedral or the date
assigned to the piece of history; it was a spiral-shaped fossil as large
as the crown of a hat; it was embedded in the marble bench, and had
been sat upon by tourists until it was worn smooth. Contrasted with the
inconceivable antiquity of this modest fossil, those other things were
flippantly modern--jejune--mere matters of day-before-yesterday. The
sense of the oldness of the Cathedral vanished away under the influence
of this truly venerable presence.

St. Mark's is monumental; it is an imperishable remembrancer of the
profound and simple piety of the Middle Ages. Whoever could ravish a
column from a pagan temple, did it and contributed his swag to this
Christian one. So this fane is upheld by several hundred acquisitions
procured in that peculiar way. In our day it would be immoral to go on
the highway to get bricks for a church, but it was no sin in the old
times. St. Mark's was itself the victim of a curious robbery once. The
thing is set down in the history of Venice, but it might be smuggled
into the Arabian Nights and not seem out of place there:

Nearly four hundred and fifty years ago, a Candian named Stammato, in
the suite of a prince of the house of Es