of holding up a mirror in which the bitterest truths about the life before it are pitilessly reflected. And in the frivolous, extravagant, decadent art of the Epoque Louis Quinze may be discerned the soul of the period, empty and perverted.

It was a legacy of bankruptcy as well as of corruption Louis XVI inherited from his grandfather. He was a fairly good man as kings go, not very able, married to an Austrian princess, Marie Antoinette. The dramatic circumstances of their fall and death have, with the passage of time, conspired to throw a veil of romantic interest about these unfortunate creatures. In spite of the vast debts accumulated by Louis XV, Marie Antoinette could see no reason why the brilliance of her queenly state should be dimmed by the economies proposed by the officers of Louis XVI. A ruinous series of loans was floated until the Minister of Finance could float no more, declared the ship of state aground and suggested that the States General be convoked to get her off the shoals. This was the chance the commons of France had looked for with a desire growing grim for one hundred and seventy-five years. We omit the steps by which they, as the Third Estate, came to declare themselves to be the real power and source of authority in the State. The State was to be no longer "I, the King," but "We, the People." In short, Absolute Monarchy and the Divine Right of Kings was to come to death-grips with the Spirit of Liberty and the Rights of Man. Nor shall we recount the story of the flight of the King and Queen, their capture and return, their imprisonment, trial and death. Suffice it to say that man in his blind instinctive struggle upward to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, took the bloodstained path of Revolution. And with the Revolution the natural course of the Renaissance was checked.

Upon the accession of Louis XVI art and manners experienced a reaction from the license that had prevailed, and the Style Louis Seize is orderly, refined and beautiful. Structure came into its own again. In the art of Louis Fifteenth's

time, every line, every form, that could be curved, was made to curve and, where possible, every curve was a compound curve. His reign had been the reign of the petticoat. Such women as La Pompadour, Du Barry and an endless stream of other courtesans dominated the scene. But as soon as the brief period of transition was past, a greater decency of manners supervened, the normal traits of rational design resumed their sway and gave promise of rising to the highest level the architecture of the Renaissance ever reached. The Revolution, with the elevation of the educated middle classes to prominence, with the prevailing inclination of the period to inspire itself by the stern virtues of republican Rome, turned men's minds backward rather than forward, and thus, in art, resulted in the purely factitious and artificial styles of the Directory and the Empire. In the creation of these of course is to be counted the personal influence of Napoleon, who saw himself as Caesar - Caesar in ermine and silk stockings.

Before we cross the Channel to England and trace the progress of the Renaissance there, let us take a backward glance and sum up the relative strength in France of the forces that contribute to the development of architecture. With the exception of the southeasterly portion where the Alps and their foothills thrust forward into France, the land is practically one great rolling expanse. No province is cut off from another by any natural barrier of sufficient difficulty to favor the cultivation of strong local individualities. Politically, the tendency from the time of Louis XI was all toward concentration of power in the hands of the King, with a highly centralized government in or near Paris. And with the King's writ the art of the capital also ran to the provinces, to be slightly modified locally by the influences of climate, materials, and the original racial characteristics of the provincials, freer and gayer in Provence, the land of gold and azure, than in Brittany, the old, grey, granite country of the Druids. So that we find far less difference between town and town than in Italy, and a comparison of the cities of France

such as we made of Italian towns would turn upon shades of difference too subtle, too technical, for the range to which we must limit ourselves here. The like is true of personalities; when men tend to conform to one general pattern, when the conditions of their life are on the whole commonplace and lacking in color and the accent of the picturesque, an account of such lives is of mild interest. Gentlemen in periwig and ruffles, backing their way out of the Presence, plans in hand, do not arouse precisely the thrill of interest we feel in the doings of men like Cellini and Michael Angelo with their free, outspoken, and rugged ways.

Religion exerted very little influence upon the art of the Renaissance in France, in spite of the strength of the Protestant movement, in spite of the long-continued persecution of the Huguenots, in spite of the religious wars which at times threatened to disrupt the realm. The royal power, buttressed by the Church of Rome, outweighed the influence of the simple religion of Christ, and the religious architecture of Renaissance France is as worldly and secular as the spirit of the monarchy.

Personality, power, patronage, everything, was concentred in the person of the King, who acted as a kind of reflecting surface throwing back in a blinding splendor the rays of glory contributed by the artists and men of letters clustered about the throne.

VIII. THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND AND HER AMERICAN COLONIES

In England, as in France, there are no geographical barriers to deter the easy spread of a general style and character. The country is even smaller. The royal power, while held in check by the Parliament, was, nevertheless, the source of influence. When Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509, six years before Francis I of France, and ten before Charles I of Spain became Emperor as Charles V, the Gothic style still

held sway in England. Where French Gothic had flowered out into the flame-like lines that gave the name Flamboyant to its latest phase, English Gothic had stiffened into the Perpendicular style as though it were a sentient thing and felt the impending Renaissance in its veins. Forty-nine years later, King Henry's great daughter Elizabeth became Queen, to rule for forty-five years and give her name to the most brilliant period of English history, the period corresponding to the Early Renaissance in Italy. Foreign voyages and exploration, conquest and colonization, the shattering of the Spanish power on the sea, a strong policy at home, brought peace and the prosperity of peace to Britain. The resplendent figures of English drama and literature, Shakspere and Jonson and their group appeared. It had taken over one hundred and fifty years for the Renaissance to interpenetrate English life, letters and art.

The comedies of Shakspere indicate how men's minds were turning toward Italy. In these, and in the tragedies of the Elizabethans, is evidence multiplied of English travel in Italy and of the fascination she exerted over the imaginations of the Northern nations, wherein dread, horror, and a fearful curiosity were commingled.

From the time of Elizabeth the old feudal character of the English castle gave way to the English country house, with its air of warm and sympathetic domesticity — a trait that was to be transmitted to the colonies of America named from the Virgin Queen. And in the manner that has become familiar to us, the transition from Gothic to Renaissance manifests itself at first in the minor details of moulding profiles, and naïve attempts to imitate Italian ornament. The stages of the English Renaissance are not invariably designated by the name of the reigning sovereign, as in France, but rather by derivatives if at all, as: the Elizabethan Period; then the Jacobean, from James I who next succeeded; Charles I and Cromwell the Protector gave no title to the work of their time, and for once the artist prevails in the School of Wren ;

the work of the reign of Charles II is sometimes called the Restoration; then William and Mary, followed by Queen Anne, and finally the Georgian period, beginning with George I in 1714 and continuing with the second, third and fourth Georges into the time of American independence.

One of the salient figures among the architects of the English Renaissance was Inigo Jones, born in 1573, nine years after Michael Angelo's death, and when Elizabeth had still thirty years before her. It is known that he visited Italy, and no doubt, Vicenza, the scene of Palladio's chief labors, and whose buildings were still fresh from the chisel. Palladio had only recently passed on- he died in 1585 — but left treatises on architecture behind him. Scamozzi, another architect and writer, was still practising his profession, and Vignola, whose writings have done more than those of any other one man to reduce architectural design to rote and formula, had died the year Jones was born. It was in this formulistic atmosphere of the Late Renaissance that he found himself as a student, and we may suppose that he came back to England bearing with him the tomes in which these men had embalmed the Classic Revival. But Inigo Jones was a man of native force and ability, and there is nothing timid or tentative about his work; his Greenwich Hospital is proof of that.

The Renaissance in England thus follows the Palladian tradition, strongly Italianate in the main; but after Christopher Wren had visited Paris and had seen the new work going on under Louis XIV, the Italian forms take on a French complexion with every evidence of its having been applied by an English hand. Sir Christopher made a new and comprehensive plan for the city of London after the Great Fire. He began St. Paul's Cathedral in 1675, one of the finest Renaissance exteriors in the world, crowned by one of the most beautiful domes, and built a whole series of other beautiful Protestant churches in London; we say Protestant, for England was, as she now is, separatist, and the ritual of the