[4] See Quarterly Review, vol. lxxvii. p. 43.
[5] It is perhaps more likely that these beautiful specimens of ancient glass were made in the island of Murano, in the lagunes of Venice, as the manufactories of the Venetians supplied the Mahomedans with many luxuries in the middle ages.
[6] The only early church in which the columns are continued on the end opposite to the altar, where the doorway is usually situated, is the Cathedral of Messina. The effect is very good, and takes off from the baldness usually observable at that end of a basilica. The early Coptic churches have no porch or narthex, an essential part of an original Greek church.
[7] This curious old sunken oratory bears a resemblance in many points to the fine church of St. Agnese, at Rome, where the ground has been excavated down to the level of the catacomb in which the holy martyr's body reposes. The long straight flight of steps down to the lower level are also similar in these two very ancient churches, although the Church of Der-el-Adra is poor and mean, whilst that of St. Agnese is a superb edifice, and is famous for being the first basilica in which a gallery is found over the side aisles. This gallery was set apart for the women, as in the oriental churches of St. Sophia at Constantinople, and perhaps, also, of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem.
[8] It is much to be desired that some competent person should write a small cheap book, with plates or wood-cuts explaining what an early Christian Church was; what the ceremonies, ornaments, vestures, and liturgy were at the time when the Church of our Lord was formally established by the Emperor Constantine: for the numerous well-meaning authors who have written on the restoration of our older churches, appear to me to be completely in the dark. Gothic is NOT Christian architecture--it is Roman Catholic architecture: the vestures of English ecclesiastics are not restorations of early simplicity--they are modern inventions taken from German collegiate dresses which have nothing to do with religion.
[9] We are perhaps not entirely acquainted with the mechanical powers of the ancients. The seated statue of Rameses II., in the Memnonium at Thebes, a solid block of granite forty or fifty feet high, has been broken to pieces apparently by a tremendous blow. How this can have been accomplished without the aid of gunpowder it is difficult to conjecture.