But while in England the new style was winning its way, in Italy it was passing the zenith of its vigour. The continued study of ancient monuments enabled architects to reduce the old methods of design to a system which could be acquired with ease, and architectural design became less a matter of invention than a capacity for adapting new buildings to old rules. In course of time the same state of things established itself in England. The invention of printing brought to the eye of English craftsmen not only plans and pictures of buildings recently erected in foreign lands, but also the rules which celebrated Italian architects had laid down for the proportion of buildings generally--rules founded partly on the study of ancient fabrics and partly on the august authority of Vitruvius. The application of these rules to circumstances and needs which had never been contemplated by their authors was the problem which English designers set themselves to solve. During the earlier years of their attempt they were almost baffled. Then came Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren, and by their commanding genius they made the rules bend to their will; but in the eighteenth century the rules triumphed completely, and, as already said, Italian buildings were copied in England almost line for line. It is the work of the men who were baffled that we are now to examine: work which, judged from the standpoint of their better tutored successors, may almost be regarded as a failure, but work which exhibits a vitality, a fancy, and a sense of romance for which we look in vain in the more correct architecture of the eighteenth century. It is not surprising that England, in common with the rest of Europe, should have felt the influence of Italy. It is, perhaps, rather a matter for wonder that she should not have felt it earlier; that the architectural Renaissance should have continued for more than a century, and have reached its prime in Italy before it landed on our shores and began to touch the more susceptible places of our English stonework. But Brunelleschi, who crowned the cathedral of Florence with its dome, and reared the Pitti Palace, had been dead seventy years; the delicate sculpture on the façade of the Certosa of Pavia was five-and-twenty years old; and Venice was busy lining her canals with palaces, when Torrigiano brought the first Italian forms to England and applied them to the tomb of Henry VII. in Westminster Abbey.