With the Restoration, however, matters improved, and Charles II., in the intervals of more congenial pursuits, was regarded as a great patron of the arts, among which architecture now took a recognised place in English opinion. Many books had been published on the subject, especially in Italy. Some of these treatises had already been translated into English sixty or seventy years earlier, but they had not been studied with full effect. The efforts of Inigo Jones towards a purer taste were highly appreciated by men of culture like John Evelyn, and it became fashionable among the elect to study building from the somewhat new point of view of architecture. The only means of becoming acquainted with the art was through books, all of which derived their ultimate inspiration from the ancient Roman, Vitruvius. Already, in the second quarter of the century, Sir Henry Wotton had written a sensible treatise on the “Elements of Architecture,” and now the same subject was undertaken by Evelyn. The Italian authorities, who were his guides, as they had been Wotton’s, had taken Vitruvius as their high priest, and the old buildings of Italy as their ensamples. Within the pale of their cult, therefore, came no Gothic at all. Evelyn, accordingly, has no words too damnatory of Gothic buildings. Barbarous nations, he says, destroyed the glorious Roman empire together with its stately monuments, “introducing in their stead, a certain fantastical and licentious manner of building, which we have since called modern (or Gothic rather): congestions of heavy, dark, melancholy, and monkish piles, without any just proportion, use, or beauty, compared with the truly ancient.” Instead of the “beautiful orders,” he says, they set up “slender and misquine pillars, or rather bundles of staves, and other incongruous props, to support incumbent weights and ponderous arched roofs, without entablature.” He begs any man of judgment to compare Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster, with its “sharp angles, jetties, narrow lights, lame statues, lace, and other cut-work and crinkle crankle,” with Inigo Jones’s Banqueting Hall, or what was then being advanced by Sir Christopher Wren at St Paul’s; and then to “pronounce which of the two manners strikes the understanding as well as the eye with the more majesty and solemn greatness.” The whole of the ancient cathedrals of England and the Continent, mentioning the most famous by name, he dismisses as “mountains of stone, vast and gigantic buildings indeed; but not worthy the name of Architecture.”