There is one property inherent in the productions of architectural art, which, while it frequently lends to them half their charm, at the same time tends more than anything else to warp and distort our critical judgments regarding them. We seldom can look at a building of any age without associating with it such historical memories as may cling to its walls; and our predilections for any peculiar style of architecture are more often due to educational or devotional associations than to purely artistic judgments. A man must be singularly ignorant or strangely passionless who can stand among the fallen columns of a Grecian temple, or wander through the corridors of a Roman amphitheatre, or the aisles of a ruined Gothic abbey, and not feel his heart stirred by emotions of a totally different class from those suggested by the beauty of the mouldings or the artistic arrangement of the building he is contemplating. The enthusiasm which burst forth in the 15th century for the classical style of art, and then proved fatal to the Gothic, was not so much an architectural as a literary movement. It arose from the re-discovery—if it may be so called—of the poems of Homer and Virgil, of the histories of Thucydides and Tacitus, of the Philosophy of Aristotle and the eloquence of Cicero. It was a vast reaction against the darkness and literary degradation of the Middle Ages, and carried the educated classes of Europe with it for the next three centuries. So long as classical literature only was taught in our schools, and classical models followed in our literature, classical architecture could alone be tolerated in our buildings, and this generally without the least reference either to its own peculiar beauties, or its appropriateness for the purposes to which it was applied. A second reaction has now taken place against this state of affairs. The revival of the rites and ceremonies of the mediæval Church, our reverent love of our own national antiquities, and our admiration for the rude but vigorous manhood of the Middle Ages,—all have combined to repress the classical element both in our literature and our art, and to exalt in their place Gothic feelings and Gothic art, to an extent which cannot be justified on any grounds of reasonable criticism. Unless the art-critic can free himself from the influence of these adventitious associations, his judgments lose half their value; but, on the other hand, to the historian of art they are of the utmost importance. It is because architecture so fully and so clearly expresses the feelings of the people who practised it that it becomes frequently a better vehicle of history than the written page; and it is these very associations that give life and meaning to blocks of stone and mounds of brick, and bring so vividly before our eyes the feelings and the aspirations of the long-forgotten past.