It would be a tempting theme of speculation to follow in the imagination the probable progress of a Greek, instead of a Roman Renaissance, into such active, but misguided schools as those of Rouen and Tours in the latter part of the fifteenth century,--of Rouen, with its Roger Arge, its brothers Leroux, who built the old and famous Hôtel Bourgtheroulde there, its Pierre de Saulbeaux, and all that legion of architects and builders who were employed by the Cardinal Amboise in his castle of Gaillon,--of Tours, with its Pierre Valence, its François Marchant, its Viart and Colin Byart, out of whose rich and picturesque craft-spirit arose the quaint fancies of the palaces of Blois and Chambord, and the playfulness of many an old Flemish house-front. Such a Renaissance would not have come among these venial sins of _naïveté_, this sportive affluence of invention, to overturn ruthlessly and annihilate. Its mission would inevitably have been, not to destroy, but to fulfil,--to invest these strange results of human frailty and human power with that grave ideal beauty which nineteen centuries before had done a good work with the simple columns and architraves on the banks of the Ilissus, and which, under the guidance of Love, would have made the arches and vaults and buttresses and pinnacles of a later civilization illustrious with even more eloquent expressions of refinement. For Greek lines do not stand apart from the sympathies of men by any spirit of ceremonious and exclusive rigor, as is undeniably the case with those which were adopted from Rome. They are not a _system_, but a _sentiment_, which, wisely directed, might creep into the heart of any condition of society, and leaven all its architecture with a purifying and pervading power without destroying its independence, where an inflexible system could assume a position only by tyrannous oppression.