But the houses had to be designed somehow, so the builder had recourse to sundry manuals or copybooks of designs for “Villas and Terrace Houses” in the worst style of the day. The idea of using such books originated in the second half of the eighteenth century, when numerous little calf-bound volumes appeared, but they contained little more than details of the Roman “Orders,” and such features as chimneypieces, doorways, etc. The result was that the speculative builder, who made his first appearance about that time, continued to build in the traditional manner, but added a classical porch and interior panelling and similar trimmings, which, even if they were often rather pedantic and un-English, were always in excellent taste. The nineteenth century copybooks sprang from a very different source. “Gothick” architecture, for two centuries a byword and a reproach among all cultivated people, had been rediscovered. From Queen Victoria’s coronation to her jubilee, architects romped over Europe and brought home sketches of Gothic detail from France and Flanders and Venice. Ruskin, who was not greatly enamoured of English Gothic, but loved it in its French and Venetian forms, spread the glad tidings among the middle-class; and the famous architect, Street, ransacked Italy and Spain in his quest. All this mass of drawings was broadcast over the country at its period of greatest industrial prosperity. Once I worked in a provincial office facing a replica of a Venetian palace, and witnessed the erection of a factory-chimney copied from Giotto’s campanile at Florence. Naturally the smaller fry in the building world aped their betters. Second-rate architects and hack draughtsmen set to work to adapt and caricature these fashionable forms for use by the builder on shops and villas. Terra-cotta manufacturers gladly joined in the game, so that soon scraps of Venetian carving and ornament came to be turned out by the mile and capitals copied from French churches were moulded in artificial stone in tens of thousands. To this movement may be ascribed a very large share in the deterioration of English towns and even villages, for the “Gothic” craze naturally spread from the centres of fashion to the smaller places. A travelled and studious architect, set down in a street of suburban villas to-day, should be capable of tracing the ultimate source of the pretentious porches, the tile cresting on the roofs, all the mechanical ornament reproduced down the row; and in nearly every case he could derive it from a Gothic church in France or Italy.