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A broad flight of steps leads down to it, and the many tall slender columns of Byzantine architecture make a perfect wilderness of pillars. Wherever we stood, we seemed always the centre from which long aisles of columns radiated till they lost themselves in the darkness. The cistern has long been empty, and is used as a ropewalk.
But, like a Byzantine Empress, slender and feeble in body, laden with precious stones, it was surrounded with eunuchs: snobs, esthetes, and critics. The nation was not musical: and the craze, so much talked of during the last twenty years, for Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, or Debussy, never reached farther than a certain class.
Iranians or Persians, Indians, Turanians, or Mongols have furnished tribute, though in unequal quantities, to this art. It may also be said that if Russia has borrowed much from Byzantium, the art elements among her population have not been without influence upon the formation of Byzantine art.
His dominions extended from the Black Sea to the Adriatic and comprised the greater part of Macedonia, Greece, Albania, Servia, and Dalmatia; leaving only to the Byzantine Empire whose civilization he introduced and sedulously promoted among the Bulgarians the cities of Constantinople, Saloniki, and Adrianople with the territory immediately surrounding them.
But the old man remembers a nephew of his back there in Bulgaria or Jugoslavia or where it may have been; and sends for him, and very wisely lets him do most of the running of things. In 527, this nephew succeeds to the purple on his uncle's death: as Justinian; and, for Europe and the Byzantine empire, and for the times, that is to say, 'considering, manvantaric doings do begin.
"I mean to say just that, Malcom. But I must tell you something more about this same Greek Byzantine painting, for there is a school of it to-day. Should you go to Southern Italy or to Russia, you would find many booths for trading, in the back of which you would see a Madonna, or some saint, painted in just this style.
On his departure, he gave Alexius all his ships, the figure-heads of which were made ornaments for one of the churches at Constantinople; and some of the presents which he brought away are still extant in Norway. In one little remote church there has lately been found a curious Byzantine picture, representing the rescue of the True Cross from the Persians by the Emperor Heraclius.
Drifting in by way of Armenia, they pressed gradually westward from Erzerum in hope of finding some unoccupied country which would prove both element and fertile. Byzantine influence was then at a very low ebb. Though apparently without a rival, it was subsisting by consent, on the prestige of its past, rather than on actual power.
The walls are ornamented with bas-reliefs and paintings, but above all these we see there a marvellous portrait in mosaic of the emperor Justinian as an old man, unhappily restored in 1863. The altar is ancient and above it is a marble coffer with Renaissance ornaments, upheld by four columns of porphyry, having two Byzantine and two Roman capitals.
But is one next to read through the sixty and odd folio volumes of the Bollandist Lives of the Saints, and the new edition of the Byzantine historians, and the State Trials, and the Encyclopædia Britannica, and Moreri, and the Statutes at large, and the Gentleman's Magazine from the beginning, each separately, and in succession?
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