The Chateaux of Blois, Chambord, and Chenonceaux in the Valley of the Loire, the Palaces of Fontainebleau, St. Germain en Laye, the Tuileries and the old Louvre in Paris are splendid examples of the former, and monuments worthy of the great artists, Pierre Lescot, Philibert Delorme, Jean Goujon, and others, who laboured upon them. They are illustrative of the employment of the small orders and ornament in low relief, which characterized the corresponding period in Italy, though they are generally richer and more spirited in design than the Italian buildings, and the soft stone which is so abundant in France permitted more lavish ornament upon the exteriors. The skeletons of each design, that is to say, the main architectural lines, stripped of elaborate detail, are much alike and can nearly all be brought back to the ancient method of superposing orders. This is no disparagement on the value of the work, for the plans of many buildings were excellent, and the variety of ornamental design was of a delicacy and imaginative beauty which has rarely been surpassed. It is questionable, indeed, whether the change which took place in the century of Louis XIV., in the introduction of larger proportions and greater severity of ornament, was so much a gain as it was considered at the time. To this period belong some of the great churches modelled upon or rather suggested by St. Peter’s in Rome: St. Paul’s in London, rebuilt by Christopher Wren; the Val de Grace, the joint work of Lemercier, Leduc, and Mansart, and the church of the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, also by Mansart, are among the finest of the period and style. The plan of the last-named church is appended as a particularly happy example in general arrangement and symmetrical variety, doing great credit to Mansart, who also built the larger portion of the celebrated Chateau de Versailles. The publication of Stewart and Revetts’ great work upon the antiquities of Athens called general attention in England to the beauty of Greek art, toward the close of the last century, and resulted in the erection of a number of buildings in imitation of Athenian monuments which were utterly inappropriate and unsuited to the English climate. In France architecture went through two or three fashionable phases, from great extravagance of design under Louis XV. to extreme simplicity under Louis XVI., finally relapsing under Napoleon into the servile copying of entire Classic buildings: a great falling off from the principle of the sixteenth century work, which had always been original in conception although borrowing detail from the antique.