Nettled by the criticism that America was not Europe, the pioneer determined to bring Europe to his doors. Relatively few American architects during the period, however, had been abroad, and still fewer had been there to any purpose; even men of culture and imagination like Hawthorne and Emerson were not at home in the physical environment of Europe, however intimate they were with its mind. The buildings that were erected under the inspiration of European tours only accentuated the barbarism of the American scene and the poverty of the architect’s imagination. A good part of our architecture today still exhibits the parvenu’s uneasiness, and is by turns French, Italian, or more or less obsolete English; but we do not, perhaps, realize with what a difference; for photography and archæological research now make it possible to produce buildings which have all the virtues of the original except originality, whereas the earlier, illiterate development of foreign examples, rehearsed in memory, resulted in a conglomerate form which resembled nothing so much, perhaps, as P. T. Barnum’s mermaid. If the Crystal Palace represents the extreme of industrial art, Colonel Colt’s Armsmear represents the opposite--untutored romanticism. Armsmear was built near Hartford, between 1855 and 1862. A writer in the Art Journal for 1876 calls this mansion a “characteristic type of the unique.” It was a “long, grand, impressive, contradictory, beautiful, strange thing.... An Italian villa in stone, massive, noble, refined, yet not carrying out any decided principles of architecture, it is like the mind of its originator, bold and unusual in its combinations.... There is no doubt it is a little Turkish among other things, on one side it has domes, pinnacles, and light, lavish ornamentation, such as Oriental taste delights in.... Yet, although the villa is Italian and cosmopolitan, the feeling is English. It is an English home in its substantiality, its home-like and comfortable aspects.” It is, alas! impossible to illustrate in these pages this remarkable specimen of American architecture; but in a lecture on the Present and Future Prospects of Chicago (1846), I have discovered its exact literary equivalent, and it will sum up the crudity and cultural wistfulness of the period perhaps better than any overt description: “I thank you [apologizes the lecturer] for the patience you have manifested on this occasion, and promise never more to offend in like manner, so long. I have now, as Cowper observes-- ‘Roved for fruit, Roved far, and gathered much....’ “And can, I think with Scott, surely say that-- ‘To his promise just Vich-Alpine has discharged his trust.’ “I propose now, gentlemen, to leave you at Carlangtoghford, ‘And thou must keep thee with thy sword.’ “Let me say to you on this occasion, as Campbell does on another: ‘Wave, Munich! all your banners wave! And charge with all your chivalry.’