The dominant designs of the early republican period proceeded directly or indirectly from such books as Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, and from such well-known examples of temple architecture in southern Europe as the Maison Carrée at Nîmes. In one sense, there was a certain fitness in adapting the Greek methods of building to America. Originally, the Greek temple had probably been a wooden building. Its columns were trees, its cornices exposed beams; and the fact that in America one could again build mightily in wood may have furnished an extra incentive to the erection of these colossal buildings. The fact that the Greek mode in America was well under way before the first example of it had appeared in Edinburgh, London, or Paris, shows perhaps that time and place both favored its introduction on this side of the Atlantic: for the availability of certain materials often, no doubt, directs the imagination to certain forms. On the whole, however, the Greek temple precedent was a bad one. For one thing, since the Greek _cella_ had no source of light except the doorway, it was necessary to introduce modifications in the elevation, and to break up the interior; and it was only in the South that the vast shadowed retreats formed by porches and second-story balconies proved a happy adaptation to the climate. Again: Greek architecture was an architecture of exteriors, designed for people who spent the greater part of the year out of doors. With no temple ritual comparable to the services of the church or cathedral, the Greeks lavished their attention upon externals, and as a great admirer of the Greeks, Sir Reginald Blomfield well says, “may have been more successful with the outside of their buildings than with the inside.” To fail with the interior in a northern climate is to fail with the essentials of a habitation; and these vast rooms, for all their ornament, too often remained bleak.