s, and her architects during the reign of
Elizabeth carried this somewhat fanciful, but at the same time
dignified, system of construction to its utmost development. All this
will be clearly and logically explained by the professors of the
academies. They will further add that after the accession of the Stuarts
the building art gradually declined, with only a few flashes of
brilliant light in the works of Inigo Jones and Wren. The Commonwealth
was prudish in art as in manners, and the Restoration was a reign of
revel and wild license. The social worlds of William and Mary and of
Queen Anne, stiff, starched, and formal, left their impress upon the
buildings of their day, which were mostly of a domestic character. The
Free Classic of the Georgian reigns followed,--more refined in
sentiment, delicate but severe in outline, aristocratic, but lacking
strength and boldness in composition. With the advent of the Victorian
Gothicists the worn-out and debased Free Classic passed into obscurity,
there to remain until the passage by Parliament of the Elementary
Education Act in 1870 brought it once more into prominence.

So much for the teachings of the academies, hampered by conservatism
and constructive traditions. They see little that is good in
architecture which cannot be traced through a long line of precedents,
gradually developing, as did the Gothic from the slender lancets and
bold buttressing of the earlier examples to the delicate tracery and
wondrous carving of Lincoln and of York. But, for all this, Queen Anne
has a history, architectural as well as political. Her short reign
witnessed the erection of a class of manor-houses and city dwellings
which, gradually improved under the two succeeding monarchs, have formed
the basis for a revival of a remarkable character. The sudden
renaissance of Queen Anne or Free Classic architecture is the growth of
but fourteen years, and yet all classes of society have been alike
filled with aspirations for Queen An-tic houses, and for domestic
appliances, and even dresses and garniture, associated with that period.
The extremely low art of the last decade of the seventeenth century has
become the "high art" of to-day, and bids fair, after outgrowing the
eccentricities of plan and detail with which many designers have loaded
it down, to develop into an honest, home-like, and thoroughly domestic
style, in consonance with the requirements of nineteenth-century culture
and refinement. Eng