He did not indeed suddenly relinquish the style which in his early days he had regarded as the perfection of beauty and truth, nor did he fail to show that he had really grasped the principles on which this truth and beauty depended. In 1824 he built the Royal Institution of Fine Arts at Manchester, an edifice of considerable size and importance. On this building it was remarked, in the ‘Builder’ of May 19th, 1860, shortly after his death,--“The building was of great importance, historically speaking, and in the results which it produced. By contrast with the pseudo-Greek, which was general in public buildings, and which in Manchester had even degenerated from the time of Harrison, it presented what was at once Greek derivatively, or Greco-Roman in details and impress, and yet was work new or original--work of art and mind. The portico, as a feature of architecture, was used and not spoiled; that feature and remainder of the building were grouped together, whereas in Greek of that day a portico was often tacked on to a many-windowed façade; the staircase hall, grand in proportions within, and culminating to a central feature of the exterior, was the forerunner of later efforts of the kind by the same architect and by others.” And even after he had given up the erection of buildings in the Greek style, it was remarked, with great truth, that “his feeling for the subtle beauty of Greek architecture never left him, and probably contributed in no slight degree to give that air of finish and refinement to his works which so greatly distinguished them.” In 1831 he made a Greek design, of great massiveness and grandeur, for the Birmingham Town Hall--a building which had the needful advantages of scale and position.[32] But with these exceptions, he did little in the style to which his early studies had been given. Practical experience confirmed the doubts which had already been suggested by theory; and he saw that Gothic and Italian had the mastery of the field.[33]