The masters of this age, chiefly through the weight of their authority as writers, exercised a wider European influence than any of their predecessors. We English, for example, have given Palladio's name to the Italian style adopted by us in the seventeenth century. This selection of one man to represent an epoch was due partly no doubt to the prestige of Palladio's great buildings in the South, but more, I think, to the facility with which his principles could be assimilated. Depending but little for effect upon the arts of decoration, his style was easily imitated in countries where painting and sculpture were unknown, and where a genius like Jean Goujon, the Sansovino of the French, has never been developed. To have rivalled the façade of the Certosa would have been impossible in London. Yet here Wren produced a cathedral worthy of comparison with the proudest of the late Italian edifices. Moreover, the principles of taste that governed Europe in the seventeenth century were such as found fitter architectural expression in this style than in the more genial and capricious manner of the earlier periods. After reviewing the rise and development of Renaissance architecture, it is almost irresistible to compare the process whereby the builders of this age learned to use dead forms for the expression of their thoughts, with the similar process by which the scholars accustomed themselves to Latin metres and the cadences of Ciceronian periods.[55] The object in each case was the same--to be as true to the antique as possible, and without actually sacrificing the independence of the modern mind, to impose upon it the limitations of a bygone civilisation. At first the enthusiasm for antiquity inspired architects and scholars alike with a desire to imitate _per saltum_, and many works of fervid sympathy and pure artistic intuition were produced. In course of time the laws both of language and construction were more accurately studied; invention was superseded by pedantry; after Poliziano and Alberti came Bembo and Palladio. In proportion as architects learned more about Vitruvius, and scholars narrowed their taste to Virgil, the style of both became more cramped and formal. It ceased at last to be possible to express modern ideas freely in the correct Latinity required by cultivated ears, while no room for originality, no scope for poetry of invention, remained in the elaborated method of the architects. Neo-Latin literature dwindled away to nothing, and Palladio was followed by the violent reactionaries of the _barocco_ mannerism.