Before he left Italy he acquired a taste for greater luxuriance of ornament and greater boldness of outline, and looked on the style of Bramante as fit only for small works and for interiors. “The Villa Pandolfini at Florence proved to him how much could be done, even in a front of small extent, by means of a good frieze and cornice. He noticed as defects the stunted proportions of the windows and the continuation of the entablatures across the piers between them; but above all he disliked the great projection of the lower story. For this so distinctly broke up the elevation into two stories that the cornice and frieze, well-proportioned to the entire height, appeared overpowering. But notwithstanding these defects, when he was at work on the street-front of the Travellers’ Club, no building had so much influence in determining its general style as the Villa Pandolfini.” The palatial fronts at Vicenza and Venice did not take the same hold upon him as those at Rome and Florence. “The Library of St. Mark at Venice, the greater Porto Palace by Palladio at Vicenza, and others of the same kind, had not only the cardinal vice of superimposed orders, but were offensive by the multiplicity and prominence of their details.... To engaged columns--’colonnades walled up’--he had a great dislike; and when, as at the Board of Trade, he had to employ them, he always relieved them from the wall by grounds or margins. Even then they never thoroughly satisfied him. The disposition of the windows (grouped in the centre) in some of the smaller Gothic and other palaces at Venice was noted by him with approval, and was not forgotten when he was designing the garden-front of the Travellers’ Club. Of palace fronts, in which an order was employed, he was most struck with those of the public prisons at Venice and Palladio’s Thiene Palace at Vicenza.” The Ducal Palace, magnificent as he felt it to be, did not satisfy him. Of the beauty of the arcaded stories he was fully sensible, nor did he object to arcaded exteriors in general. “But no consideration could reconcile him to arcades or colonnades supporting, as here, a heavy mass of building. Whatever might be the character of the superstructure, he required that the lower part of the building should be comparatively solid and plain; the reverse appeared unnatural. In the finest portico he was not satisfied unless the basement (or the steps) was equal in mass to the pediment above. Even in the river-front of his new Palace at Westminster he rejected the idea (once entertained) of introducing a cloister; and was so jealous of the solidity and plainness of his basement, that he grudged every window and would hardly enrich a gateway.”