Mr. Norman Shaw has been the chief evangelist of this strange revival. Mr. Shaw is a very clever designer, with a special felicity in piquant and picturesque groupings, which he had shown in Gothic work, especially in country-houses, before the caprice seized him of uniting free composition with classic detail, and the attempt at this union is what is most distinctively known as Queen Anne. Whoever considers the elements of this combination would hardly hope that the result could be a chemical union, or more than a mechanical mixture. Classic detail is the outcome and accompaniment of the simplest construction possible, which was employed by the Greek architects in the simplest combination possible, and precisely because it was so simple and so primitive they were enabled to reduce it to an “order,” and to carry it to a pitch of purity, lucidity, and refinement to which the most enthusiastic mediævalist will scarcely maintain that more complicated constructions have ever attained. But this very perfection, which was only attainable when life was simple and the world was young, this necessary relation between the construction and the detail of Greek Doric, makes it forever impossible that Greek detail should be successfully “adapted” to modern buildings. A late writer on the theory of architecture has said of Greek architecture: “As partisans of its historical glory, we should desire that it remain forever in its historical shrine.” We laugh at the men of two generations ago who covered Europe and America with private and public buildings in reproduction as exact as they could contrive of Grecian temples. But, after all, if the Greek temple be the ultimate, consummate flower, not only of all actual but of all possible architectural art, were not these men wiser in their generation than their successors who have taken the Greek temple to pieces and tried to construct modern buildings out of its fragments? There is even something touching and admirable, in this view, in the readiness and completeness of the sacrifice to beauty which the reproducers of the Greek temples made of all their merely material comforts and conveniences, something that we miss in the adapters. The Romans can scarcely be said to have attempted this adaptation. They built Roman buildings for purposes and by methods which had never entered the minds of Greek architects to conceive, and they built them with no more thought of art than enters the mind of a modern railway engineer in designing a truss bridge. After they were designed according to their requirements it was that the Roman engineer overlaid them with an irrelevant trellis of Greek architecture, debasing and corrupting the Greek architecture in the process. And it is this hybrid architecture, which analysis would at once have dissolved into its component parts, that was accepted without analysis as the starting-point of “the new departure” of the fifteenth century, and the ultimate English debasement