and builders who were employed by the Cardinal Amboise in his castle of Gaillon,—­of Tours, with its Pierre Valence, its Francois Marchant, its Viart and Colin Byart, out of whose rich and picturesque craft-spirit arose the quaint fancies of the palaces of Blois and Chambord, and the playfulness of many an old Flemish house-front.  Such a Renaissance would not have come among these venial sins of naivete, this sportive affluence of invention, to overturn ruthlessly and annihilate.  Its mission would inevitably have been, not to destroy, but to fulfil,—­to invest these strange results of human frailty and human power with that grave ideal beauty which nineteen centuries before had done a good work with the simple columns and architraves on the banks of the Ilissus, and which, under the guidance of Love, would have made the arches and vaults and buttresses and pinnacles of a later civilization illustrious with even more eloquent expressions of refinement.  For Greek lines do not stand apart from the sympathies of men by any spirit of ceremonious and exclusive rigor, as is undeniably the case with those which were adopted from Rome.  They are not a system, but a sentiment, which, wisely directed, might creep into the heart of any condition of society, and leaven all its architecture with a purifying and pervading power without destroying its independence, where an inflexible system could assume a position only by tyrannous oppression.

Yet when we examine the works of the Renaissance, after the system had become more manageable and acclimated under later Italian and French hands, we cannot but admire the skill with which the lightest fancies and the most various expressions of human contrivance were reconciled to the formal rules and proportions of the Roman orders.  The Renaissance palaces and civil buildings of the South and West of Europe are so full of ingenuity, and the irrepressible inventive power of the artist moves with so much freedom and grace among the stubborn lines of that revived architecture, that we cannot but regard the results with a sort of scholastic pride and pleasure.  We cannot but ask ourselves, If the spirit of those architects could obtain so much liberty under the restrictions of such an unnatural and unnecessary despotism, what would have been the result, if they had been put in possession of the very principles of Hellenic Art, instead of these dangerous and complex models of Rome, which were so far removed from the purity and simplicity of their origin?  Up to a late day, the great aim of the Renaissance has been to interpret an advanced civilization with the sensuous line; and so far as this line is capable of such expression, the result has been satisfactory.