much, and began to introduce a severity of
treatment and a fineness of detail which correspond to some extent to
the French style of Louis XVI. The interior decorations in plaster by
these architects are of great elegance and often found in old houses
in London, as in Hanover Square, on the Adelphi Terrace, and
elsewhere. The list of the eighteenth century architects closes with
the names of Sir Robert Taylor and the two Dances, one of whom built
the Mansion House and the other Newgate; and Stuart, who built several
country mansions, but who is best known for the magnificent work on
the antiquities of Athens, which he and Revett published together in
1762, and which went far to create a revolution in public taste; for
before the close of the century there was a general cry for making
every building and every ornamental detail purely and solely Greek.

The architects above named, and others of less note were much employed
during the eighteenth century in the erection of large country houses
of Italian, usually Palladian design, many of them extremely
incongruous and unsatisfactory. Here and there a design better than
the average was obtained, but as a rule these stately but cold
buildings are very far inferior to the picturesque and home-like
manors and mansions built during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I.

[Illustration: FIG. 83.--HOUSES AT CHESTER. (16TH CENTURY.)]

It is worth notice that the picturesque element, inherited from the
Gothic architecture of the middle ages, which before the eighteenth
century had completely vanished from our public buildings, and the
mansions of the wealthy did not entirely die out of works executed in
remote places. In the half-timbered manors and farmhouses which
abound in Lancashire, Cheshire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire, and in
other minor works, we always find a tinge, sometimes a very full
colouring, of the picturesque and the irregular; the gables are sharp,
upper storeys overhang, and the treatment of the timbers is
thoroughly Gothic (Fig. 83); so are the mouldings, transoms and
mullions to the windows, and barge boards to the roofs. In the reign
of James I. a mode of enriching the exteriors of dwelling-houses, as
well as their ceilings, chimney-pieces, &c., with ornaments modelled
in plaster came in, and though the remaining specimens are from year
to year disappearing, yet in some old towns (_e.g._ in Ipswich)
examples of this sort of treatment (known as Jacobean) st