If Romantic Classicism, the nearly universal style with which nineteenth-century architecture began, was predominantly French in origin and in its continuing ideals and standards, the same decades that saw it reach maturity also saw the rise of another major movement in the arts that was definitely English. The ‘Picturesque’, a critical concept that had been increasing in authority for two generations in England, received the dignity of a capital P in the 1790s. The term Romantic Classicism is a twentieth-century historian’s invention, attempting by its own contradictoriness to express the ambiguity of the dominant mode of this period in the arts; the term Picturesque, on the other hand, was most widely used and the concept most thoroughly examined just before and just after 1800 (see Chapters 1 and 6). To the twentieth century, on the whole, the aesthetic standards of Romantic Classicism—or perhaps one should rather say the visual results—have been widely acceptable. The results of the application of Picturesque principles in architecture, on the other hand, have not been so generally admired; indeed, until lately the more clearly and unmistakably buildings realized Picturesque ideals, the less was usually the esteem in which they were held by posterity. On the whole, in architecture if not in landscape design, the twentieth century has preferred to see the manifestations of the Picturesque around 1800 as aberrations from a norm considered primarily to have been a ‘Classical Revival’. As the adjectival aspect of the term Romantic Classicism makes evident, however, the Classicism of the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth was not at all the same as that of the High Renaissance, nor even that of the Academic Reaction of the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. Romantic Classicism aimed not so much towards the ‘Beautiful’, in the sense of Aristotle and the eighteenth-century aestheticians, as towards what had been distinguished by Edmund Burke in 1756 as the ‘Sublime’.