These educated eighteenth-century gentlemen, these contemporaries of “Junius” and Gibbon, who had read Horace and Livy and Plutarch, had one foot in their own age, and the other in the grave of Rome. In America, Thomas Jefferson exemplified this whole culture at its best and gave it a definite stamp: he combined in almost equal degrees the statesman, the student, and the artist. Not merely did Jefferson design his own Monticello; he executed a number of other houses for the surrounding gentry--Shadwell, Edgehill, Farrington--to say nothing of the Virginia State Capitol and the church and university at Charlottesville. It was Jefferson who in America first gave a strict interpretation to classicism; for he had nothing but contempt for the free, Georgian vernacular which was making its way among those who regarded the classical past as little more than a useful embellishment. The contrast between the classical and the vernacular, between the architecture of the plantation and the architecture of the village, between the work of the craftsman, and the work of the gentleman and the professional architect, became even more marked after the Revolutionary War. As a result of that re-crystallization of American society, the conditions of classical culture and classical civilization were for a short time fused in the activities of the community, even in the town. One may express the transformation in a crude way by saying that the carpenter-builder had been content with a classical finish; the architects of the early republic worked upon a classical foundation. It was the Revolution itself, I believe, that turned the classical taste into a myth which had the power to move men and mold their actions.