According to the usual custom, in the year 1827, a scholar of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, having achieved the distinguished honor of being named Grand Pensionnaire of Architecture for that year,—­was sent to the Academie Francaise in the Villa Medici at Rome, to pursue his studies there for five years at the expense of the Government.  This scholar was Henri Labrouste.  While in Italy, his attention was directed to the Greek temples of Paestum.  Trained, as he had been, in the strictest academic architecture of the Renaissance, he was struck by many points of difference between these temples and the Palladian formulae which had hitherto held despotic sway over his studies.  In grand and minor proportions, in the disposition of triglyphs in the frieze, in mouldings and general sentiment, he perceived a remarkable freedom from the restraints of his school,—­a freedom which, so far from detracting from the grandeur of the architecture, gave to it a degree of life and refinement which his appreciative eye now sought for in vain among the approved models of the Academy.  Studying these new revelations with love and veneration, it was not long before the pure Hellenic spirit, confined in the severe peristyles and cellas of the Paestum temples, entered into his heart, with all its elastic capacities, all its secret and mysterious sympathies for the new life which had sprung up during its long imprisonment in those stained and shattered marbles.  Labrouste, on his return to Paris, in 1830, surprised the grave professors of the Academy, Le Bas, Baltard, and the rest, by presenting to them, as the result of his studies, carefully elaborated drawings of the temples at Paestum.  Witnessing, with pious horror, the grave departures from their rules contained in the drawings of their former favorite, they charged him with error, even as a copyist.  True to their prejudices, their eyes did not penetrate beyond the outward type, and they at once began to find technical objections.  They told him, never did such an absurdity occur in classic architecture as a triglyph on a corner!  Palladio and the Italian masters never committed such an obvious crime against propriety, nor could an instance of it be found in all Roman antiquities.  It was in vain that poor Labrouste upheld the accuracy of his work, and reminded the Academy that among the Roman models no instance had been found of a Doric corner,—­that this order occurred only so ruined that no corner was left for examination, or in the grand circumferences of the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus, where, from the nature of the case, no corner could be.  The professors still maintained the integrity of their long-established ordinances, and, to disprove the assertions of the young pretender, even sent a commission to examine the temples in question.  The result was a confirmation of the fact, the ridicule of Paris, the consequent branding of the young artist as an architectural heretic, and a continued persecution of him by the Ecole des Beaux Arts.  Undaunted, however, Labrouste established an atelier in Paris, to which flocked many intelligent students, sympathizing with the courage which could be so strong in the conviction of truth as to brave in its defence the displeasure of the powerful hierarchy of the School.