culous
building. Nor is it merely wasted wealth or distempered conception which
we have to regret in this Renaissance architecture: but we shall find in
it partly the root, partly the expression, of certain dominant evils of
modern times--over-sophistication and ignorant classicalism; the one
destroying the healthfulness of general society, the other rendering our
schools and universities useless to a large number of the men who pass
through them.

Now Venice, as she was once the most religious, was in her fall the most
corrupt, of European states; and as she was in her strength the centre
of the pure currents of Christian architecture, so she is in her decline
the source of the Renaissance. It was the originality and splendor of
the palaces of Vicenza and Venice which gave this school its eminence in
the eyes of Europe; and the dying city, magnificent in her dissipation,
and graceful in her follies, obtained wider worship in her decrepitude
than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her admirers into the
grave.

Sec. XXXIX. It is in Venice, therefore, and in Venice only that effectual
blows can be struck at this pestilent art of the Renaissance. Destroy
its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere else.
This, therefore, will be the final purpose of the following essay. I
shall not devote a fourth section to Palladio, nor weary the reader with
successive chapters of vituperation; but I shall, in my account of the
earlier architecture, compare the forms of all its leading features with
those into which they were corrupted by the Classicalists; and pause, in
the close, on the edge of the precipice of decline, so soon as I have
made its depths discernible. In doing this I shall depend upon two
distinct kinds of evidence:--the first, the testimony borne by
particular incidents and facts to a want of thought or of feeling in the
builders; from which we may conclude that their architecture must be
bad:--the second, the sense, which I doubt not I shall be able to excite
in the reader, of a systematic ugliness in the architecture itself. Of
the first kind of testimony I shall here give two instances, which may
be immediately useful in fixing in the readers mind the epoch above
indicated for the commencement of decline.

Sec. XL. I must again refer to the importance which I have above attached
to the death of Carlo Zeno and the doge Tomaso Mocenigo. The tomb of
that doge is, as I said, wrought by a Floren