openings,
and ornament them with something from Nature."

So in the very midst of the pampered and enervated over-refinement of
Roman decay, Constantine did something more than merely turn the
conquering eagle back, against the course of the heavens, for which
Dante seems to blame him,[2] when he established his capital at
Byzantium; for there at once upon the new soil, and in less than a
single century, sprang to life again all the natural modes of building
and decoration that, despised as barbaric, had been ignored and
forgotten amid the Roman luxury and sham.

It is a curious feature of these latest days of ours that this searching
after sincerity should seem to be leading us towards a similar revival;
taking even very much the same forms. We went back, at the time of the
Gothic revival, to the forgotten Gothic art of stained-glass; now tired,
as it would seem, of the insincerity and mere spirit of imitation with
which it and similar arts have been practised, a number of us appear to
be ready to throw it aside, along with scholarly mouldings and
traceries, and build our arts afresh out of the ground, as was done by
the Byzantines, with plain brickwork, mosaic, and matched slabs of
marble. Definite examples in recent architecture will occur to the
reader. But I am thinking less of these--which for the most part are
deliberate and scholastic revivals of a particular style, founded on the
study of previous examples and executed on rigid academic methods--than
of what appears to be a widespread awakening to principles of
simplicity, sincerity, and common sense in the arts of building
generally. Signs are not wanting of a revived interest in building--a
revived interest in materials for their own sake, and a revived practice
of personally working in them and experimenting with them. One calls to
mind examples of these things, growing in number daily--plain and strong
furniture made with the designer's own hands and without machinery, and
enjoyed in the making--made for actual places and personal needs and
tastes; houses built in the same spirit by architects who condescend to
be masons also; an effort here and an effort there to revive the common
ways of building that used to prevail--and not so long ago--for the
ordinary housing and uses of country-folk and country-life, and which
gave us cottages, barns, and sheds throughout the length and breadth of
the land; simple things for simple needs, built by simple men, withou