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The Renaissance in architecture had reached England at about the time of the Great Fire (1666), fully two generations after the Italian influence had made its way into English literature; and it came to America, as one might guess, about a generation later. It was left for Alexander Pope, who himself was a dutiful Augustan, to sum up the situation with classic precision to Lord Burlington, who had published Palladio’s Antiquities of Rome:

“You show us Rome was glorious, not profuse,

And pompous buildings once were things of use.

Yet shall, my lord, your just and noble rules

Fill half the land with imitation fools;

Who random drawings from your sheets shall take

And of one beauty many blunders make.”

These lines were a warning and a prophecy. The warning was timely; and the prophecy came true, except in those districts in which the carpenter continued to ply his craft without the overlordship of the architect.

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The first effect of the Renaissance forms in America was not to destroy the vernacular but to perfect it; for it provided the carpenter-builder, whose distance from Europe kept him from profiting by the spirited work of his forbears, with a series of ornamental motifs. New England, under the influence of an idol-breaking Puritanism, had been singularly poor in decoration, as I have already observed: its modest architectural effects relied solely on mass, color, and a nice disposition of parts. In its decorative aspects medievalism had left but a trace in America: the carved grotesque heads on the face of the Van Cortlandt Mansion in New York, and the painted decorations in some of the older houses and barns among the Pennsylvania Dutch pretty well complete the tally.