The dream that is dying and the dream that is coming to birth do not stand in sequence, but mingle as do the images in a dissolving view; and during the very years that the architecture of the Renaissance, both in Europe and America, achieved new heights of formal design, the first factories were being planted in Staffordshire and Yorkshire, the Duke of Bridgewater built his famous canal, and Horace Walpole designed his “Gothic” mansion on Strawberry Hill. The coincidence of industrialism and romanticism is just as emphatic in America as in England; and it is not without historic justice that the architect who in 1807 designed the chapel of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, after the Gothic fashion, successfully introduced a steam pumping system in Philadelphia’s waterworks. While the industrial buildings of the period represented nothing but a lapse from the current vernacular, due to haste and insufficient resources, romantic architecture was a positive influence; and it will perhaps best serve our purpose to examine the romantic heritage in its pristine form, rather than in the work of disciples like Latrobe, whose American practice is dated about two generations later. The author of The Castle of Otranto had a perverse and wayward interest in the past; and the spirit he exhibited in both his novel and his country home was typical of the romantic attitude everywhere. What attracted Walpole to the Gothic style was little more than the phosphorescence of decay: he summoned up the ghosts of the Middle Ages but not the guilds; and instead of admiring the soundness of medieval masonry, those who followed directly in his path were affected rather by the spectacle of its dilapidation, so that the production of authentic ruins became one of the chief efforts of the eighteenth-century landscape gardener. It is not a great step from building a ruin to building a mansion that is little better than a ruin. While Walpole defended Strawberry Hill by saying he did not aim to make his house so Gothic as to exclude convenience, it happened again and again that the picturesque was the enemy of simple honesty and necessity; and just as Walpole himself in his refectory used wall paper that imitated stucco, so did other owners and builders use plaster and hangings and wall paper and carpet to cover up defects of construction. Towers that no one ever climbed, turrets that no one could enter, and battlements that no one rose to defend, took the place of the classic orders. The drawbridge-and-moat that embellished Mr. Wemmick’s villa in Great Expectations was not a wild conceit of Dickens but a relic of Walpole and his successors.