The characteristic south front of the Museum, one of the most overwhelming examples of Romantic Classical stylophily, or love of columns—there are forty-eight of them—was one of the last portions of the whole to be completed (Plate 33). The great temple portico and the colonnade that is carried round the inner sides and the ends of the flanking wings was probably not decided on until the thirties; such a redundancy of columns seems to belong well into the second quarter of the century—compare Elmes’s St George’s Hall in Liverpool (Plate 34A) or Basevi’s Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The façade of Smirke’s General Post Office of 1824-9, with columns used only at the centre and the ends, and two ranges of good-sized windows between, was more characteristic of the usual Romantic Classical balance between columnar display and rationalistic provision for internal function. Wilkins and Smirke were not alone in providing Grecian public buildings for the London of George IV. The London Corn Exchange of 1827-8 by George Smith (1783-1869) was an excellent example, less heavy than most of Smirke’s work, less inconsequent than Wilkins’s. Decimus Burton, who provided various gatehouses at Hyde Park as well as the screen at Hyde Park Corner in 1825—the modest ones at Prince’s Gate are almost identical with Schinkel’s tiny Doric temples at the Potsdamer Tor in Berlin—also provided the finest façade in Waterloo Place when he built the Athenaeum there in 1829-30. This clubhouse is severe and astylar externally but grand and sumptuous within to a degree hitherto unknown. Henry Roberts (1803-76), a Smirke assistant, followed his former master closely in the design of the Fishmongers’ Hall built in 1831-3. His great Ionic portico rises as splendidly above the solid substructure that flanks the Thames as Klenze’s Walhalla does above its stepped terraces. Corporate clients that came to the fore in the thirties saw in the solemn Grecian mode the best means of achieving representational monumentality in their buildings; moreover, they were increasingly ready to employ leading architects in order to obtain it. C. R. Cockerell (1788-1863), the son of S. P. Cockerell, soon to be Soane’s successor as Architect of the Bank of England, began his distinguished career as a favourite servant of the financial world by providing the Westminster Insurance Office in the Strand in 1832 with a range of Doric half-columns. Five years later, in the London and Westminster Bank in Lothbury, he attained a still greater effect of dignified restraint, with no loss of sumptuousness, in an astylar façade of great originality.