to the middle of the eighteenth century the mediaval style merely spelt discomfort, desolation, and gloom.1 Noble owners, so far as their purse allowed, converted their Gothic inheritances, as best they could, to the Georgian taste, or rebuilt them outright. Then enters the spirit of history, the romance of the distant and the past, with archæology at its heels. The connoisseurs, about 1740, are full of zeal for the stylistic distinctions between the Egyptian, the Gothic, and the Arabesque, and charmingly vague about their limits. Their studies are pursued without calling in question the superior fitness of the classical tradition. Nevertheless, the orthodoxies of archæology now hold sway. They are submitted to not without reluctance. Gray, in 1754, writes of Lord Brooke, at Warwick Castle: 'He has sash'd the great Appartment . . . and being since told that square sash-windows were not Gothic, he has put certain whim-wams within side the glass, which, appearing through, are made to look like fret-work. Then he has scooped out a little Burrough in the massy walls of the place for his little self and his children, which is hung with chintzes in the exact 1 There were not wanting those who maintained this opinion throughout the whole period of the romantic movement. In 1831, when it was at its height, even the stately and tempered mediævalism of Knole still inspires the Duchesse de Dino with the utmost melancholy: 'Cette vieille fée (the housekeeper) montre fort bien l'antique et lugubre demeure de Knowles, dont la tristesse est incomparable.'-Duchesse de Dino, Chronique. manner of Berkley Square or Argyle Buildings. What in short can a lord do nowadays that is lost in a great, old, solitary castle but skulk about, and get into the first hole he finds, as a rat would do in like case?' But the vital taste of the time could not rest satisfied with archæology. The Gothic forms were a romantic material, rich with the charm of history. Could they be fused with the living style? Batty Langley thought they could, and by no other mind more readily than his own. 'Ancient architecture, restored and improved by a great variety of grand and useful designs, entirely new, in the Gothick mode'; 'Gothic Architecture, improved by rules and proportions.' These were the titles Langley successively affixed to the first two editions of his work. They show two alternative ways of regarding the same question-the Gothic, steadied and sobered by 'proportion'; the ancient architecture made various with Gothic fancies. Here was no question of a mediæval revival, as the next century understood it, but a true attempt at fusion. But then the two elements to be fused were utterly incongruous. If this was not clear before, Batty Langley's designs must have made it obvious to all who were not blinded by historical enthusiasm. And, on the whole, the right inference was drawn. 'Gothic Umbrellos to terminate a view'; Gothic pavilions for 'the inter 1 Letters of Thomas Gray, edited by D. C. Tovey, vol. 1. No. cxiv. section of ways in a Wood or Wildernesse,' were well enough. Here they might be admitted as curiosities -as literary reminders of the romantic past, or shrines to the poetry of nature with which the mediaval style was conceived to be related. Above all, they might act as a foil to the classical elements themselves, and do a dual service by stimulating the sense of history while they set off the immaculate consistency of the time. The Gothic suggestions might even penetrate the house. They might, without discordancy, provide the traceries of a book-case or enrich the mouldings of a Chippendale table. Here and there, in the light spirit of fashionable caprice, they might furnish the decoration of a room, just as, elsewhere, an Eastern scheme might dominate. to go further, and Gothicise the main design, seemed, at the first, an obvious fault of taste. 'I delight,' writes Gray to Wharton, 'to hear you talk of giving your house some Gothic ornaments already. If you project anything, I hope it will be entirely within doors and don't let me (when I come gaping into Coleman Street) be directed to the "gentleman's at the ten pinnacles" or "with the Church Porch at his door."' And when, at Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole allowed a quaint imitation of medievalism to furnish his whole design, the concession, startling and even absurd as it seemed to his contemporaries, 1 Letters of Thomas Gray, vol. 1. No. cxiv. But was made in a spirit of amused pedantry and conscious eccentricity, or, at most, of archæological patronage; nor could the amateurs of that time have credited the idea that the trefoils and pinnacles of Walpole's toy heralded a movement which would before long exterminate alike the practice and the understanding of their art. The irony of this situation has an exact and tragic counterpart in the favour accorded at that epoch by the more philosophic and enlightened of the French aristocracy to those theories of 'natural' equality (themselves another expression of romanticism) which were destined to drive these noble patrons, their philosophy and their enlightenment, entirely out of existence. Side by side with this sense of Gothic as an amusing exotic-an attitude which was thoroughly in the Renaissance spirit and characteristic, above all, of the eighteenth century-there grew up a more serious perception of its imaginative value. When Goethe visits Strasburg Cathedral it is no longer, for him, the work of 'ignorant and monkish barbarians,' but the expression of a sublime ideal: and Goethe's mind foreshadows that of the coming century. At the same time he has no quarrel with the existing standards; a complete reaction against these is as yet unimaginable. But a change of attitude shows itself both with regard to Gothic and also to the living style. These now came more and more to be regarded symbolically, as standing for certain ideas. And in particular the habit arose of regarding Greek and Gothic art as contrasted, parallel and alternative modes of feeling. But the good taste of the period, although already permeated with Romanticism, recognised this distinction between them: the Gothic must remain an external object of admiration; the Greek feeling could be fused with the existing art, the Greek forms grafted on to, or extricated from, the living tradition. Just as it had required no impossible change to impart a Chinese turn to the gay Renaissance style of Louis XV., so, with equal facility, the romantic idealisation of Greece could be expressed by emphasising the elements of severity in the essentially Renaissance style of Louis XVI. But a species of literary symbolism becomes increasingly evident in the attempt. The interest is shifted, more and more, from the art itself to the ideals of civilisation. The Greek modes of the period are deliberately meant to 'suggest' its political or other doctrines; and the intrusion of Egyptian detail which followed Napoleon's African expedition is an instance of the same allusive tendency. Thus, though an apparent continuity is still maintained, a radical change has taken place. A romantic classicism of sentiment and reflection has overlaid and stifled the creative classicism which sprang up in the quattrocento and till now had run its course. In imparting |