Waterhouse, Percy Leslie: The story of architecture throughout the ages: an introduction to the study of the oldest of the arts for students and general readers (London: B. T. Batsford, 1924)

242

RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE

the greater part of the eighteenth century was,
to a large extent, a matter of names. The
architects were greatly under the influence of
Palladio, whose drawings had been published
and were greatly in vogue. Under his lead
there was a tendency, even in domestic buildings,
to sacrifice everything to symmetry and stateli-
ness. Bacon’s dictum was reversed, for the
houses were now “ built to be looked on, not
lived in.” With all this, however, there was
comparatively little noteworthy architecture
produced. The work of the century, taken as
a whole, shows little originality or high artistic
merit; nothing more can be said of it than that
it was a respectable sort of architecture,
hovering between dignity and dulness.
Among the later architects of the century, Sir
William Chambers designed the most important
buildingof the time, Somerset House (1776), which
he remodelled from designs of Inigo Jones, and
treated in the refined style which marked every-
thing that left his hands. A greater work—
through its wide influence over successive gener-
ations of students—was his book, a "Treatise on
Civil Architecture.” Of this period also are the
Mansion House, Tondon, by George Dance, senior ;
the Bank of England, by Sir John Soane ; Kedle-
ston Hall in Derbyshire, by Robert Adam-—one
of the four brothers who gave their name to the_
elegant "Adam” style of interior decoration
which they introduced—and old Newgate Prison,
by the younger Dance, a vigorous and appropriate
design, now replaced by the Central Criminal
Court.