It is but repeating a well-worn truth to say that the influence of the early Grecian architects upon the followers of their art in all countries of recognized civilized enlightenment, throughout the ages that have succeeded them, has been an almost dominant one. Robert Adam, the architectural authority in the time of George III., says, in the introduction to his work on the ruins of the palace of the Emperor Diocletian: “The buildings of the ancients are in architecture what the works of nature are with respect to the other arts: they serve as models which we should imitate and as standards by which we ought to judge; for this reason they who aim at eminence, either in the knowledge or practice of architecture, find it necessary to view with their own eyes the works of the ancients which remain, that they may catch from them those ideas of grandeur and beauty which nothing, perhaps, but such an observation can suggest.” It is equally true that no country that has experienced an evolution in intelligence and culture, during the twenty-five hundred years that have fled since the time of Pericles, has succeeded in introducing any new school of architecture, that has not been compelled to draw upon ancient Greece for many of the most important and essential features of the art it could only modify, but never wholly re-create. The Gothic, or pointed-arch style, that sprung into such beautiful being in the thirteenth century, and reigned a queen within the Christian countries of Europe for several centuries thereafter, came more nearly answering for an original scheme of architecture than perhaps any other of equal importance, and yet had it been deprived of the Grecian props that helped to sustain it, it must have fallen to the ground. In the Gothic the effort was made to incline the inherited principles of architecture more closely toward the spiritual progress of the people, but when at last it had run its course, and was dethroned, owing to a realization of the fact that even a closer allegiance to classic models could be made to answer still better spiritual requirements, how completely did the artistic temperament of the people revert to Greece and Rome, as the light of their returning inspiration and truth appeared with the dawn of the sixteenth century. Renaissance architecture and Renaissance art swept Europe like a wave, and the people turned with reactionary enthusiasm to the ancient standards of art, as they did to the study of classic authors, and to the writing of even Greek and Latin verses.