In his first practice Jones appears to have worked in a mixed style. The mongrel Elizabethan art was still in full vogue, and with this style, says Cunningham, “Inigo compounded, and for some time persevered in what the wits of the succeeding age nicknamed King James’s Gothic.” The well-known porch of St. Mary’s church, Oxford, if it be by Jones, may furnish an example of this earlier style. But he soon sought to free himself from the vagaries of the Elizabethan craftsman, and strove to introduce a rigorous use of Palladian forms. He had learned the grammar of the orders as formulated by the architects of the later Renaissance, and had apparently conceived a sincere belief that the Palladian canons embodied all that was most excellent in architectural design. He saw in the Elizabethan art only its manifold infractions of the rules of order and proportion, and its grotesque distortions of classic forms. To reëstablish these rules and restore these forms appeared to him the way to regenerate English art. First among his extant works that can be certainly identified is the well-known Banqueting Hall built in 1619, for King James I, as a part of the projected palace of Whitehall, for which he had prepared the plans on a vast scale. The first remark prompted by this design is that it is not at all English. Every form and feature of the native art is eliminated. The Elizabethan house, however overlaid with foreign elements, was English in its primary forms and expression. But here Inigo Jones swept away everything English, and substituted a Palladian scheme that is foreign to England in every particular. The low-pitched roof, the plain rectangular outline, and the narrow undivided window openings are as Italian as the orders with which the façade is overlaid. But such was the state of taste among the influential classes that these features were approved, and the design was applauded with acclamation. “It spread,” says Cunningham, “the love of classic architecture far and wide, and there was soon a growing demand for works which recalled Athens to the learned, and presented something new to the admiration of the vulgar.”[161] The learned had then small knowledge of Athenian architecture, and even now many learned people fail to consider that there was never in Athens anything at all like Palladian design.