_Sir William Chambers_ (1726-96) was the greatest of the later 18th-century architects. His fame rests chiefly on his _Treatise on Civil Architecture_, and the extension and remodelling of +Somerset House+, in which he retained the general _ordonnance_ of Inigo Jones’s design, adapting it to a frontage of some 600 feet. _Robert Adams_, the designer of Keddlestone Hall, _Robert Taylor_ (1714-88), the architect of the Bank of England, and _George Dance_, who designed the Mansion House and Newgate Prison, at London--the latter a vigorous and appropriate composition without the orders--close the list of noted architects of the eighteenth century. It was a period singularly wanting in artistic creativeness and spontaneity; its productions were nearly all dull and respectable, or at best dignified, but without charm. +BELGIUM.+ As in all other countries where the late Gothic style had been highly developed, Belgium was slow to accept the principles of the Renaissance in art. Long after the dawn of the sixteenth century the Flemish architects continued to employ their highly florid Gothic alike for churches and town-halls, with which they chiefly had to do. The earliest Renaissance buildings date from 1530-40, among them being the Hôtel du Saumon, at Malines, at Bruges the Ancien Greffe, by _Jean Wallot_, and at Liège the +Archbishop’s Palace+, by _Borset_. The last named, in the singular and capricious form of the arches and baluster-like columns of its court, reveals the taste of the age for what was _outré_ and odd; a taste partly due, no doubt, to Spanish influences, as Belgium was in reality from 1506 to 1712 a Spanish province, and there was more or less interchange of artists between the two countries. The +Hôtel de Ville+, at Antwerp, by _Cornelius de Vriendt_ or _Floris_ (1518-75), erected in 1565, is the most important monument of the Renaissance in Belgium. Its façade, 305 feet long and 102 feet high, in four stories, is an impressive creation in spite of its somewhat monotonous fenestration and the inartistic repetition in the third story of the composition and proportions of the second. The basement story forms an open arcade, and an open colonnade or loggia runs along under the roof, thus imparting to the composition a considerable play of light and shade, enhanced by the picturesque central pavilion which rises to a height of six stories in diminishing stages. The style is almost Palladian in its severity, but in general the Flemish architects disdained the restrictions of classic canons, preferring a more florid and fanciful effect than could be obtained by mere combinations of Roman columns, arches, and entablatures. De Vriendt’s other works were mostly designs for altars, tabernacles and the like; among them the rood screen in Tournay Cathedral. His influence may be traced in the Hôtel de Ville at Flushing (1594). [Illustration: FIG. 190.--RENAISSANCE HOUSES, BRUSSELS.]