It was not until the early forties that Greek Revival buildings began to be characterized by contemporaries as ‘insipid’. But Basevi’s façade of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, begun in 1837 and carried to completion with some emendations by C. R. Cockerell in 1847 after Basevi’s death, well illustrates some of the changes that were already coming over Romantic Classical design. As at Wilkins’s National Gallery, the silhouette is elaborately varied—here much more skilfully than in Trafalgar Square. As with Tite’s Royal Exchange, there is also a most un-Grecian sort of plastic bombast. The orders are not Grecian but Roman, moreover, and the spirit is more Roman still, but Roman of the later Empire in the East, as at Baalbek or Palmyra. St George’s Hall in Liverpool, the latest of the major Romantic Classical monuments of England, was finished like the Fitzwilliam by C. R. Cockerell long after its original designer’s death. It displays much less bombast and much more true grandeur of scale. The young Harvey Lonsdale Elmes (1814-49) won two successive competitions, for a Hall and for Law Courts, in 1839 and 1840 respectively. Then, when it was decided to combine the two in one structure, he paid a visit to Berlin to study the work of Schinkel. Schinkelesque, indeed, is the long colonnade facing Lime Street Station, and even more so the curious square piers, free-standing in their upper half, that Elmes used elsewhere on the building (Plate 34A). The temple portico at the south end is conventional enough, but with its steps boldly raised above a massively plain foundation wall; the rounded end to the north is much more original and also rather French in feeling. French surely, but of the Empire rather than the contemporary July Monarchy, is the tremendous scale of the whole and the stately axial planning of the sort to be seen in many Prix de Rome projects of the preceding fifty years. The great hall is slightly larger than its prototype in the Baths of Caracalla.[80] As completed by Cockerell in the early fifties, the interior lost all the Grecian severity of the exterior. Together with the elegant elliptical concert hall, planned by Elmes but entirely executed by Cockerell, the great hall belongs to the next period of architectural development as much by its rich decoration as by its date.