pt to give architectural detail. Cicognara,
as is now generally known, is so inaccurate as hardly to deserve
mention.

Indeed, it is not easy to be accurate in an account of anything, however
simple. Zoologists often disagree in their descriptions of the curve of
a shell, or the plumage of a bird, though they may lay their specimen on
the table, and examine it at their leisure; how much greater becomes the
likelihood of error in the description of things which must be in many
parts observed from a distance, or under unfavorable circumstances of
light and shade; and of which many of the distinctive features have been
worn away by time. I believe few people have any idea of the cost of
truth in these things; of the expenditure of time necessary to make sure
of the simplest facts, and of the strange way in which separate
observations will sometimes falsify each other, incapable of
reconcilement, owing to some imperceptible inadvertency. I am ashamed of
the number of times in which I have had to say, in the following pages,
"I am not sure," and I claim for them no authority, as if they were
thoroughly sifted from error, even in what they more confidently state.
Only, as far as my time, and strength, and mind served me, I have
endeavored down to the smallest matters, to ascertain and speak the
truth.

Nor was the subject without many and most discouraging difficulties,
peculiar to itself. As far as my inquiries have extended, there is not a
building in Venice, raised prior to the sixteenth century, which has not
sustained essential change in one or more of its most important
features. By far the greater number present examples of three or four
different styles, it may be successive, it may be accidentally
associated; and, in many instances, the restorations or additions have
gradually replaced the entire structure of the ancient fabric, of which
nothing but the name remains, together with a kind of identity,
exhibited in the anomalous association of the modernized portions: the
Will of the old building asserted through them all, stubbornly, though
vainly, expressive; superseded by codicils, and falsified by
misinterpretation; yet animating what would otherwise be a mere group of
fantastic masque, as embarrassing to the antiquary, as to the
mineralogist, the epigene crystal, formed by materials of one substance
modelled on the perished crystals of another. The church of St. Mark's
itself, harmonious as its structure may at