It is not surprising that in the British Dominions there was no such direct French influence in this period as in Latin America. Urban entities like the Colmena and its terminal square in Lima, Peru, pavilioned and mansarded throughout, rival European examples like the Søtorvet in Copenhagen or the Galerij in Amsterdam. Before they gave way to skyscrapers, the _hôtels particuliers_ along the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City were more numerous and more plausibly Parisian than along Commonwealth Avenue in Boston or Bellevue Avenue at Newport. But both in Canada and in Australia the Second Empire mode arrived from England late and in a more corrupted form than in America. The mansarded Windsor Hotel of 1878 in Montreal hardly rivalled the Palmer House of 1872 in Chicago by J. M. Van Osdel (1811-91), to which the rich merchant Potter Palmer was as proud to give his name as to the incredible fake castle that he built for his own occupancy a decade later. The Princess Theatre in Melbourne, Australia, built by William Pitt in 1877, with its three square-domed mansards, has an appealing nonchalance, like that of the contemporary edifices of the mining towns high in the American Rocky Mountains—the hotel in Virginia City, Nevada, that has been mentioned earlier, or the much more modest Opera House in Central City, Colorado, for example. But the public architecture of the third quarter of the century in Australia was more restrained in design just because it was generally so very retardataire. The Parliament House in Melbourne, begun in 1856 by John G. Knight (1824-92) and completed in 1880 by Peter Kerr (1820-1912), has academic virtues not unworthy of Kerr’s master Barry, though its giant colonnades recall rather those of Brodrick’s contemporary Town Hall in Leeds. The Treasury Buildings in Melbourne, by John James Clark (1838-1915) of 1857-8, are not unworthy of comparison with High Renaissance work of the period on the Continent. Other public buildings of the sixties and seventies are of more definitely Victorian character, but Early Victorian rather than High. For example, Clark’s Government House of 1872-6 in South Melbourne is a towered Italian Villa consciously modelled on Queen Victoria’s Osborne House of a generation earlier. Both in Australia and in Canada the Victorian Gothic had more vitality in this period (see Chapter 11).