Thus four more weary centuries were added to the fruitless slumbers of Ideal Beauty among the temples of Greece.  Meanwhile, in turn, the Byzantine, the Northman, the Frank, the Turk, and finally the bombarding Venetian, left their rude invading footprints among her most cherished haunts, and defiled her very sanctuary with the brutal touch of barbarous conquest.  But the kiss which was to dissolve this enchantment was one of Love; and not Love, but cold indifference, or even scorn, was in the hearts of the rude warriors.  So she slept on undisturbed in spirit, though broken and shattered in the external type, and it was reserved for a distant future to be made beautiful by her disenchantment and awakening.

In 1672, a pupil of the artist Lebrun, Jacques Carrey, accompanied the Marquis Ollier de Nointee, ambassador of Louis XIV., to Constantinople.  On his way he spent two months at Athens, making drawings of the Parthenon, then in an excellent state of preservation.  These drawings, more useful in an archaeological than an artistic point of view, are now preserved in the Bibliotheque Imperiale of Paris.  In 1676, two distinguished travellers, one a Frenchman, Dr. Spon, the other an Englishman, Sir George Wheler, tarried at Athens, and gave valuable testimony, in terms of boundless admiration, to the beauty and splendor of the temples of the Acropolis and its neighborhood, then quite unknown to the world.  Other travellers followed these pioneers in the traces of that old civilization.  But in 1687 Koenigsmark and his Venetian forces threw their hideous bombshells among the exquisite temples of the Acropolis, and, igniting thereby the powder-magazine with which the Turks had desecrated the Parthenon, tore into ruins that loveliest of the lovely creations of Hellas.  It was not until the publishing of the famous work of Stuart and Revett on “The Antiquities of Athens,” in 1762, that the world was made familiar with the external expressions of Greek Architecture.  This publication at once created a curious revolution in the practice of architecture,—­a revolution extending in its effects throughout Europe.  A fever arose to reproduce Greek temples; and to such an extent was this vacant and thoughtless reproduction carried out, that at one time it bid fair to supplant the older Renaissance.  The spirit of the new Renaissance, however, was one of mere imitation, and had not the elements of life and power to insure its ultimate success.  No attempt was made to acclimate the exotic to suit the new conditions it was thus suddenly called upon to fulfil; for the sentiment which actuated it, and the Love with which it was created, were not understood.  It was the mere setting up of old forms in new places; and the Grecian porticos and pediments and columns, which were multiplied everywhere from the models supplied by Stuart and Revett, and found their way profusely into this New World, still stare upon us gravely with strange alien looks.