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There is no compulsion on you to marry Alec, and the Byzantine Saint Peter still hangs in the cathedral. Let any one so much as hint that you are throwing yourself at Alec's head, and I shall have the hinter dynamited. No, no, my Joan, we may yield to higher powers; but we do not abandon our pilgrimage because it is shared by an old scamp of a father whose sole anxiety is to fleece his son.
For a time thought was relatively free and produced a wealth of original ideas and daring speculations. These were the work not only of Arabs but also of subject Christians, Jews, and Persians, many of them being heretics previously depressed under the iron bands of persecuting Byzantine orthodoxy and Magism. Gradually, however, this enlightened era passed away.
Hardly in the accepted forms of good taste are the Byzantine slabs of marble stuck upon the walls here and there, as in a museum; the Renaissance screens; the overpowering organ case; the votive offerings and tablets without number; and the alleged wonderful astronomical clock, with its colossal wooden figures of the sixteenth century, all of which go to compose a heterogeneous mass more interesting as to occasional detail than as a thorough expression of saintly temperament.
The Byzantine atmosphere in Germany was the ruin of Emperor William; it enveloped him and clung to him like a creeper to a tree; a vast crowd of flatterers and fortune-seekers who deserted him in the hour of trial. The Emperor William was merely a particularly distinctive representative of his class.
This is, at first sight, a plain and straightforward description of the silkworm; but we know that it was not till long afterwards, nearly a thousand years after, in Justinian's reign, that the silkworm and the mulberry-tree which is its food were brought out of the East into Byzantine Greece.
The never-discarded aim of Russia to plant its double cross on the banks of the Byzantine Bosporus, and its batteries on those of the Hellespont, and thus to transfer its centre of gravity from the secluded shores of the Baltic to the gates of the Mediterranean; the never-slumbering dread of this expansion, which has made the integrity of Turkey an inviolable principle with the British statesmen of every sect; and the growing inevitability of a bloody collision on the fields of central Asia of the two powers, one of which is master of the north, and the other of the south of that continent, have rendered Russia and Great Britain inveterate foes.
Laughing and joking, they mounted, eight of them, in flowers as when in the Hippodrome. The sun was going down, but the streets were yet bright with day. It was the hour when balconies overhanging the narrow thoroughfares were crowded with women and children, and the doors beset with servants the hour Byzantine gossips were abroad filling and unfilling their budgets.
At his first nod the French prostrate themselves obediently, and there remain, as in a natural position; the lower class, the peasants and the soldiers, with animal fidelity, and the upper class, the dignitaries and the functionaries, with Byzantine servility.
The Sultans who succeeded him for some generations, all men of vigor, and availing themselves not less of the decrepitude which had by that time begun to palsy the Byzantine sceptre, than of the martial and religious fanaticism which distinguished their own followers, crossed the Hellespont, conquering Thrace and the countries up to the Danube.
The three great distinctive eras of Art, in a purely psychological sense, have been the Egyptian, the Grecian, and the Romanesque, including in the latter term both Roman Art itself and all subsequent Art, whether derived directly or indirectly from Rome, as the Byzantine, the Moresque, the Mediaeval, and the Renaissance.
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