This lack of historical data is the more remarkable when we consider that the style now known as that of Queen Anne is but of yesterday. We can follow the gradual development of styles and systems of construction and their transitions into other and later styles, from the Egyptian, Syrian, Grecian, Roman, and Byzantine, and the wondrous science of the Middle Ages, to the wealth of Continental Renaissance, but of the style of Queen Anne we can find little more than the name. England gradually remodelled her feudal castles into the noble and picturesque manor-houses of the Tudor kings, and her architects during the reign of Elizabeth carried this somewhat fanciful, but at the same time dignified, system of construction to its utmost development. All this will be clearly and logically explained by the professors of the academies. They will further add that after the accession of the Stuarts the building art gradually declined, with only a few flashes of brilliant light in the works of Inigo Jones and Wren. The Commonwealth was prudish in art as in manners, and the Restoration was a reign of revel and wild license. The social worlds of William and Mary and of Queen Anne, stiff, starched, and formal, left their impress upon the buildings of their day, which were mostly of a domestic character. The Free Classic of the Georgian reigns followed,--more refined in sentiment, delicate but severe in outline, aristocratic, but lacking strength and boldness in composition. With the advent of the Victorian Gothicists the worn-out and debased Free Classic passed into obscurity, there to remain until the passage by Parliament of the Elementary Education Act in 1870 brought it once more into prominence.