t deal with
these two periods separately; the first of them being that which has
been often above alluded to, under the name of the transitional period.

We shall consider in succession the general form, the windows, doors,
balconies, and parapets, of the Gothic palaces belonging to each of
these periods.

Sec. VI. First. General Form.

We have seen that the wrecks of the Byzantine palaces consisted merely
of upper and lower arcades surrounding cortiles; the disposition of the
interiors being now entirely changed, and their original condition
untraceable. The entrances to these early buildings are, for the most
part, merely large circular arches, the central features of their
continuous arcades: they do not present us with definitely separated
windows and doors.

But a great change takes place in the Gothic period. These long arcades
break, as it were, into pieces, and coagulate into central and lateral
windows, and small arched doors, pierced in great surfaces of brick
wall. The sea story of a Byzantine palace consists of seven, nine, or
more arches in a continuous line; but the sea story of a Gothic palace
consists of a door and one or two windows on each side, as in a modern
house. The first story of a Byzantine palace consists of, perhaps,
eighteen or twenty arches, reaching from one side of the house to the
other; the first story of a Gothic palace consists of a window of four
or five lights in the centre, and one or two single windows on each
side. The germ, however, of the Gothic arrangement is already found in
the Byzantine, where, as we have seen, the arcades, though continuous,
are always composed of a central mass and two wings of smaller arches.
The central group becomes the door or the middle light of the Gothic
palace, and the wings break into its lateral windows.

Sec. VII. But the most essential difference in the entire arrangement,
is the loss of the unity of conception which, regulated Byzantine
composition. How subtle the sense of gradation which disposed the
magnitudes of the early palaces we have seen already, but I have not
hitherto noticed that the Byzantine work was centralized in its
ornamentation as much as in its proportions. Not only were the lateral
capitals and archivolts kept comparatively plain, while the central ones
were sculptured, but the midmost piece of sculpture, whatever it might
be,--capital, inlaid circle, or architrave,--was always made superior to
the rest. In the Fondac