Up to the time of the Chicago World’s Fair, Richardson had imitators, and they were not always mean ones. L. H. Buffington, in Minneapolis, had to his credit a number of buildings which would not, perhaps, have dishonored the master himself; but, as so often happens, the tags in Richardson’s work were easier to imitate than his spirit and inventiveness; and the chief marks of the style he created are the all-too-solid courses of rough stone, the round arch, the squat columns, and the contrasts in color between the light granite and the dark sandstone or serpentine. Mr. Montgomery Schuyler, an excellent architectural critic, once said, not without reason, that Richardson’s houses were not defensible except in a military sense; but one is tempted to read into these ponderous forms partly the architect’s unconscious desire to combat the infirmity and jerry-building of his lower contemporaries, and partly his patron’s anxiety to have a seat of refuge against the uneasy proletariat. A new feudalism was entrenching itself behind the stockades of Homestead and the other steel-towns of the Pittsburgh district. Here was a mode of building, solid, formidable, at times almost brutal, that served the esthetic needs of the barons of coal and steel almost as well as the classic met those heroes who had survived the War of Independence. I have emphasized what was strong and fine in Richardson’s work in order to show how free it was from the minor faults of romanticism; and yet it reckoned without its host, and Richardson, alas! left scarcely a trace upon the period that followed. Romanticism was welcomed when it built churches; tolerated when it built libraries; petted when it built fine houses; but it could not go much farther. Richardson was a mason, and masonry was being driven out by steel; he was an original artist, and original art was being thrust into the background by connoisseurship and collection; he was a builder, and architecture was committing itself more and more to the paper plan; he insisted upon building foursquare, and building was doomed more and more to _façaderie_. The very strength of Richardson’s buildings was a fatal weakness in the growing centers of commerce and industry. It takes more than a little audacity to tear down one of Richardson’s monuments, and so, rather ironically, they have held their own against the insurrections of traffic and realty speculation; but the difficulty of getting rid of these Romanesque structures only increased the demand for a more frail and facile method of construction.