Victor Hugo said in Notre Dame that the printing-press destroyed architecture, which had hitherto been the stone record of mankind. The real misdemeanor of the printing-press, however, was not that it took literary values away from architecture, but that it caused architecture to derive its value from literature. With the Renaissance the great modern distinction between the literate and the illiterate extends even to building; the master mason who knew his stone and his workmen and his tools and the tradition of his art gave way to the architect who knew his Palladio and his Vignola and his Vitruvius. Architecture, instead of striving to leave the imprint of a happy spirit on the superficies of a building, became a mere matter of grammatical accuracy and pronunciation; and the seventeenth-century architects who revolted from this regime and created the baroque were at home only in the pleasure gardens and theaters of princes. For the common run of architects, particularly in the northern countries, the Five Orders became as unchallengeable as the eighty-one rules of Latin syntax. To build with a pointed arch was barbarous, to build with disregard for formal symmetry was barbarous, to permit the common workman to carry out his individual taste in carving was to risk vulgarity and pander to an obsolete sense of democracy. The classics had, it is true, united Europe anew in a catholic culture; but alas! it was only the leisured upper classes who could fully take possession of the new kingdom of the mind. The Five Orders remained firmly entrenched on one side, the “lower orders” on the other. Hereafter, architecture lives by the book. First it is Palladio and Vignola; then it is Burlington and Chambers; then, after the middle of the eighteenth century, the brothers Adam and Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens. Simpler works with detailed prescriptions for building in the fashionable mode made their way in the late seventeenth century among the smaller fry of carpenters and builders; and they were widely used in America, as a guide to taste and technique, right down to the middle of the nineteenth century. It was by means of the book that the architecture of the eighteenth century from St. Petersburg to Philadelphia seemed cast by a single mind. We call the mode Georgian because vast quantities of such building was done in England, as a result of the general commercial prosperity of that country; but it was common wherever European civilization had any fresh architectural effort to make, and if we call this style “colonial” in America it is not to mark any particular lapse or lack of distinction.