The impetuous current of modern life beats impatiently against that cumbrous solidity of peristyle which sheltered well in its day the serene philosophers of the Agora, but which is now the merest impediment in the way of modern traffic and modern necessities.  But presently the spirit of formalism, engendered by the old Renaissance, took hold of the revived Greek lines, and stiffened them into acquiescence with a base mathematical system, which effectually deprived them of that life and reproductive power which belong only to a state of artistic freedom.  They were reduced to rule and deadened in the very process of their revival.

So the Greek Ideal, though strangely transplanted thus into the noise of modern streets, was not awakened from its long repose by the clatter and roaring of our new civilization.  As regarded the uses of life, it still slept in petrifactions of Pentelic marble.  And when those petrifactions were repeated in modern quarries, it was merely the shell they gave; the spirit within had not yet broken through.

Greek lines, therefore, owed their earliest revival to the vagaries of a capricious taste, and the desire to give zest to the architecture of the day by their novelty.  It was not for the sake of the new life there was in them, and of that pliable spirit of refinement 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!