This hollow argument was very active during the ferment of the Renaissance, which became to architecture what a political party spirit is to an army. In fact, it was the Renaissance that produced the disintegrating party strife of rival “styles,” and soon the followers of classic forms and ceremonies were more powerful than their opponents, who believed in the native genius of Gothic art. The aim of our classic men was to renew under our Northern sky an alien inspiration born and bred in the ardent climates of Greece and of Rome. In other words, they wished to repeat, by plodding and self-conscious effort, what Rome had done in architecture with the patient and slow methods of her colonisation. In this way they appealed to everybody who tried to seem erudite, and their endeavours entered that world of educated fashion where a false quantity was a greater sin than intemperance. Just as the chatty, delightful Montaigne wanted to hide his genius among profuse gleanings from ancient writers, so most architects believed that they could do no good in life unless they tried to be Greek or Roman. Progress was no longer an organic growth, it was a copied fashion, an inconvenient mode. Not even a church could be built without help from pagan temples. Not an equestrian statue could be modelled unless a Christian of sorts, either king or warrior, put on the costume of a Cæsar, and then straddled ill at ease across the back of a reasonable horse, which alone merited the long life of bronze. Amid this ferment of comic priggishness and pedantry young men served their apprenticeship, and became artists and craftsmen. Inevitably, bridge-builders were affected, and as prigs most of them did their work as public servants.