e man
who boasted that he had wiped out the Christian superstition from the
world, that we see the noblest forestalling of the long arcades of the
Christian basilica.

It is with thoughts like these, thoughts pressing all the more upon us
where every outline is clear and every detail is visible, that we tread
for the first time the Court of Jovius--the columns with their arches on
either side of us, the vast bell-tower rising to the sky, as if to mock
the art of those whose mightiest works might still seem only to grovel
upon earth. Nowhere within the compass of the Roman world do we find
ourselves more distinctly in the presence of one of the great minds
of the world's history; we see that, alike in politics and in art,
Diocletian breathed a living soul into a lifeless body. In the bitter
irony of the triumphant faith, his mausoleum has become a church, his
temple has become a baptistery, the great bell-tower rises proudly over
his own work; his immediate dwelling-place is broken down and crowded
with paltry houses; but the sea-front and the Golden Gate are still
there amid all disfigurements, and the great peristyle stands almost
unhurt, to remind us of the greatest advance that a single mind ever
made in the progress of the building art.

At the present time the city into which the house of Diocletian has
grown is the largest and most growing town of the Dalmatian coast. It
has had to yield both spiritual and temporal precedence to Zara, but,
both in actual population and all that forms the life of a city, Spalato
greatly surpasses Zara and all its other neighbors. The youngest
Dalmatian towns, which could boast neither of any mythical origin nor of
any Imperial foundation, the city which, as it were, became a city by
mere chance, has outstript the colonies of Epidauros, of Corinth, and of
Rome.

The palace of Diocletian had but one occupant; after the founder no
Emperor had dwelled in it, unless we hold that this was the villa near
Salona where the deposed Emperor Nepos was slain, during the patriciate
of Odoacer. The forsaken palace seems, while still almost new, to have
become a cloth factory, where women worked, and which therefore appears
in the "Notitia" as a Gynaecium. But when Salona was overthrown, the
palace stood ready to afford shelter to those who were driven from their
homes. The palace, in the widest sense of the word--for of course its
vast circuit took in quarters for soldiers and officials of var