nt so suited to the wise
re-birth of ancient Love in Art. It is not surprising that some of the
more modern masters of the old Renaissance, with whom that system had
become venerable, from its universal use as the vehicle by which
the greatest artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had
expressed their thoughts and inspirations, regarded with peculiar
distrust these outlandish innovations on the exclusive walks of their
own architecture. For they saw only a few external forms which the
beautiful principles of Hellenic Art had developed to fit an old
civilization; the applicability of these primary principles to the
refinement of the architectural expressions of a modern state of society
they could not of course comprehend. About the year 1786, we find Sir
William Chambers, the leading architect of his day in England, in his
famous treatise on "The Decorative Part of Civil Architecture," giving
elaborate and emphatic expression to his contempt of that Greek Art,
which had presented itself to him in a guise well suited to cause
misapprehension and error. "It must candidly be confessed," he says,
"that the Grecians have been far excelled by other nations, not only in
the magnitude and grandeur of their structures, but likewise in point of
fancy, ingenuity, variety, and elegant selection." A heresy, indeed!

Two distinguished German artists--the one, Schinkel of Berlin, born in
1781,--the other, Klenze of Munich, born in 1784--were children when
Chambers uttered these treasonable sentiments concerning Greek Art.
Later, at separate times, these artists visited Greece, and so filled
themselves with the feeling and sentiment of the Art there, so
consecrated their souls with the appreciative study of its divine Love,
that the patient Ideal at last awoke from its long slumbers, entered
into the breathing human temples thus prepared for it by the pure rites
of Aphrodite, _and once more lived_. Thus in the opening years of the
nineteenth century was a new and reasonable Renaissance, not of an
antique type, but of a spirit which had the gift of immortal youth, and
uttered oracles of prophecy to these chosen Pythians of Art.

Through Schinkel, the pure Hellenic style, only hinted at previously in
the attempts of less inspired Germans, such as Langhaus, who embodied
his crude conceptions in the once celebrated Brandenburg Gate, was
fairly and grandly revived in the Hauptwache Theatre and the beautiful
Museum and the Bausc