This neo-classic inspiration of Napoleonic French contrivance found favour in America, thanks to the strong Francophile sentiment prevailing in the latter part of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, which even dictated the colour and design of ladies’ gowns and their method of coiffure. In the able hands of such men as Charles Bulfinch, the neo-classic manifestation well merited all the popular approval accorded it. It is scarcely fair, however, to put Bulfinch forth, at least in his earlier period, as a typical exponent of Classic Revival architecture. He was, it is true, imbued with the new influences but he had too much creative instinct and too much sense of fitness ever to descend to mere copying or wholesale borrowing. Besides, he was, one might say, by date of birth and training, a product of the Adam age and, by native bias, in full sympathy with its delicate and refined methods of expression. Indeed, we may properly regard Bulfinch as marking the transition from the Adam or last phase of Georgian architecture to the modes of the Classic Revival for he combined in his work many of the best features of both. He knew how and when to employ Adam delicacy and refinement of detail or Adam exuberance of embellishment without falling into a surfeit of finicky and saccharine over-elaboration; he knew also when and where to use classic boldness and vigour and even classic austerity without sinking from classic grace into any of the heavy Roman forms of brutal vulgarity and military bombast that sometimes marred the work of later exponents of Classic Revival inspiration. Bulfinch was possessed of consummate good taste, a fine sense of proportion and a genius for judicious adaptation. He was educated while the Adam influence was at its height, had broadened his field by observation and foreign travel and began to practise just before the first fresh impetus of direct classicism was launched. It was, therefore, quite natural that, with his trained perception and happy faculty of selection and combination, he should have picked out the best in each school, and peculiarly appropriate that his work should exemplify the transitional stage by which one was merged into the other for, in the evolutionary process, already alluded to, the purest form of neo-classic design found its analogue in the earlier Adam practice.