st to her military glory, was one in which,
while all Europe around her was wasted by the fire of its devotion,
she first calculated the highest price she could exact from its piety
for the armament she furnished, and then, for the advancement of her
own private interests, at once broke her faith and betrayed her
religion....

There are, therefore, two strange and solemn lights in which we have
to regard almost every scene in the fitful history of the Rivo Alto.
We find, on the one hand, a deep and constant tone of individual
religion characterizing the lives of the citizens of Venice in her
greatness; we find this spirit influencing them in all the familiar
and immediate concerns of life, giving a peculiar dignity to the
conduct even of their commercial transactions, and confest by them
with a simplicity of faith that may well put to shame the hesitation
with which a man of the world at present admits (even if it be so in
reality) that religious feeling has any influence over the minor
branches of his conduct. And we find as the natural consequence of all
this, a healthy serenity of mind and energy of will exprest in all
their actions, and a habit of heroism which never fails them, even
when the immediate motive of action ceases to be praiseworthy. With
the fulness of this spirit the prosperity of the state is exactly
correspondent, and with its failure her decline....

I have said that the two orders, Doric and Corinthian, are the roots
of all European architecture. You have, perhaps, heard of five orders:
but there are only two real orders; and there never can be any more
until doomsday. On one of these orders the ornament is convex: those
are Doric, Norman, and what else you recollect of the kind. On the
other the ornament is concave: those are Corinthian, Early English,
Decorated, and what else you recollect of that kind. The transitional
form, in which the ornamental line is straight, is the center or root
of both. All other orders are varieties of these, or fantasms and
grotesques, altogether indefinite in number and species.

This Greek architecture, then, with its two orders, was clumsily
copied and varied by the Romans with no particular result, until they
began to bring the arch into extensive practical service; except only
that the Doric capital was spoiled in endeavors to mend it, and the
Corinthian much varied and enriched with fanciful, and often very
beautiful imagery. And in this state of things came