To return to England. The transformation visible in English tastes and habits, when the first force of the Renascence had spent itself, was most extraordinary. The stride forward had been tremendous. The new school of grotesque had rooted itself in our soil (just as the biros and the flies of the old world introduced in the new colonies have exterminated indigenous forms); certain masks, caryatides, wreaths, etc, settled into 'standard English patterns,' which have never since lost their popularity; and the love and observation of beauty per se seemed, as we have said, to be a newly added faculty. Everything was sacrificed to the impression on the eye, and ideas were prized only as they ministered to the feelings, whether of admiration, or horror, or compassion, or other sentiments. In this way it seems to me that the art of the Renascence was wholly sensual.

Refinements received from France and Italy increased, no doubt, the general average of domestic comfort, decorum, and luxury here; but many superfluities both in dress and decoration were dropped quietly, as good sense, forks, and the stern rule of the Protector supervened. Jewelled incrustations, and masses of precious metal went out of fashion with the overgrown ruff and trunkhose, and a certain sobriety of colouring with better thrift characterised goodly houses inhabited by reasonable people.

It is as amusing as it is interesting now to trace in Evelyn's invaluable Diary the orthodox opinions of Wren's enlightened friends on the subject of that old English art which we still call Gothic, as Evelyn first did, in spite of the protest of many antiquaries. Possessed by the flame and glamour of the Renascence, Royalist and Puritan united in forgetting that the new school was Pagan, and without meaning or fitness in our climate and for our faith; whilst the older school was so exclusively Christian and English that the term 'English Gothic' has had to be coined to distinguish it from Norman and Saxon art. Nothing which was not classic then satisfied 'people of taste': ' The ancient Greek and Roman architecture,' says Evelyn, ' answers all the perfections required in a faultless and accomplished building: such as for so many ages were so renowned and reputed by the universal suffrages of the civilised world, and would doubtless have still subsisted, and made good their claim, had not the Goths and Vandals subverted and demolished them, introducing in their stead a certain fantastical and licentious manner of building, which we have since called Modem or Gothic; congestions' (what an exquisitely disdainful word for the glorious creations of thought and fancy, free as a bird, which fourteenth-century genius reared!)' of heavy, dark, melancholy, and monkish piles, without any just proportion, use, or beauty.'

The Gothic cathedrals of York, Lincoln, Salisbury, Winchester, and many more in France, England, and Germany, can afford to bear even kindly Evelyn's opprobrium.