who were not vitally touched by the dominant interests of the period were not immune to the fashion, once it had been set. II In New England, not unnaturally, the influence of the merchant prevailed in architecture for a longer time, perhaps, than it did elsewhere. Samuel McIntire, a carver of figureheads for ships and moldings for cabins, provided an interior setting in the fashion of Robert Adam, which enabled the merchant of Salem to live like a lord in Berkeley Square; and Bulfinch, a merchant’s son, began by repairing his father’s house, went on a grand tour of Europe, and returned to a lucrative practice which included the first monument on Bunker Hill, and the first theater opened in Boston. Under McIntire’s assiduous and scholarly hands, the low-lying traditional farmhouse was converted into the bulky square house with its hipped roof, its classical pilasters, its frequently ill-proportioned cupola, its “captain’s walk,” or “widow’s walk.” The merchant with his eye for magnitude lords it over the farmer with his homely interest in the wind and the weather; and so McIntire, the last great figure in a dying line of craftsmen-artists, is compelled to make up by wealth of ornament a beauty which the earlier provincial houses had achieved by adaptation to the site without, and to subtlety of proportion within. The standard of conspicuous waste, as Mr. Thorstein Veblen would call it, spread from the manor to the city mansion. Throughout the rest of the country, the pure classical myth created the mold of American architecture, and buildings that were not informed by this myth attempted some sort of mimicry, like the mansion Squire Jones built for Marmaduke Temple in Cooper’s The Pioneers. There are churches standing in New Jersey and New York, for example, built as late as 1850, which at a distance have the outlines and proportions of classic buildings, either in the earlier style of Wren, or in the more severe and stilted Greek manner favored by a later generation. It is only on closer inspection that one discovers that the ornament has become an illiterate reminiscence; that the windows are bare openings; that the orders have lost their proportions, and that, unlike the wandering mechanic, who “with a few soiled plates of English architecture” helped Squire Jones, the builder could no longer pretend to talk learnedly “of friezes, entablatures, and particularly of the composite order.” Alas for a bookish architecture when the taste for reading disappears! III