+THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.+ By the end of the seventeenth century the Renaissance, properly speaking, had run its course in Europe. The increasing servility of its imitation of antique models had exhausted its elasticity and originality. Taste rapidly declined before the growth of the industrial and commercial spirit in the eighteenth century. The ferment of democracy and the disquiet of far-reaching political changes had begun to preoccupy the minds of men to the detriment of the arts. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the extravagances of the Rococo, Jesuit, and Louis XV. styles had begun to pall upon the popular taste. The creative spirit was dead, and nothing seemed more promising as a corrective for these extravagances than a return to classic models. But the demand was for a literal copying of the arcades and porticos of Rome, to serve as frontispieces for buildings in which modern requirements should be accommodated to these antique exteriors, instead of controlling the design. The result was a manifest gain in the splendor of the streets and squares adorned by these highly decorative frontispieces, but at the expense of convenience and propriety in the buildings themselves. While this academic spirit too often sacrificed logic and originality to an arbitrary symmetry and to the supposed canons of Roman design, it also, on the other hand, led to a stateliness and dignity in the planning, especially in the designing of vestibules, stairs, and halls, which render many of the public buildings it produced well worthy of study. The architecture of the Roman Revival was pompous and artificial, but seldom trivial, and its somewhat affected grandeur was a welcome relief from the dull extravagance of the styles it replaced.