Architecturally considered, this evolution that culminated in the full fruition of the Classic Revival shows three influences that are to be reckoned in any attempt at its analysis. In the first place, there was the Adam phase of the Georgian mode which had begun to find pronounced expression in the American Colonies from about 1770 onward. The greater refinements of this type, as analysed in preceding chapters, were strongly in evidence up to 1800 or shortly afterward and their Adam provenance was clearly distinguishable. In the second place, there were the carpenter-designed and built houses of plainly defined Georgian ancestry. During the eighteenth century, the public mind had become so thoroughly imbued with the Georgian spirit of architectural classicism, tempered and modified, to be sure, by conveyance through a British medium, but classicism all the same, that even the most unpretentious little houses gave evidence of the prevailing influence in one form or another. It might be a house door with pilasters and pediment or it might be a mantel. The pilasters flanking the doorway might have lost all traces of near kinship to any of the classic orders, so far as their details were concerned, and so might the pediment also, but the mere fact that they were there showed plainly the source whence they were derived. These carpenter-designed-and-built houses of the end of the eighteenth century may be regarded as a residuum of the architectural spirit of the epoch. Last of all, there was the pure classic influence, the circumstances of whose transplanting to America we shall examine in detail. Both the architecture of the Georgian period and the architecture of the Classic Revival were essentially classic in spirit but there was a vast difference between their several manifestations of classicality and it is most important that we should grasp that fundamental difference. The classicism of Georgian architecture was free in its spirit and interpretation and was elastic in its adaptability to the requirements of domestic or public edifices. The architects who applied it were blessed with common sense and while they incorporated a distinct element of formal order in their work, they were not trammelled by so narrow a conventionalism that they feared to make such adaptations as their own original genius prompted, provided they were consistent with the source of general inspiration. In other words, the classicism of Georgian architecture was classicism humanised and rationalised by transmission through the channels of the Renaissance or the labours of such discriminating students of antiquity as the Brothers Adam. It was elastic and suited alike to public edifices and abodes of both high and low degree. It was also direct and simple and had the dignity and vitality that art unaffected and ingenuous always shows. For this very reason it was so convincing and so long retained its hold upon popular taste.