WINTER VIEW OF EASTOVER.
A GHOST OF THE GRAND EPOCH, ROSEWELL, GLOUCESTER COUNTY, VA.
Of course, these Colonial houses are Renaissance, because Renaissance, since Mediæval times, has been the connecting link history has found convenient to unite the present with the past. Yet there is not a building in either England or France or Italy like any of them. They are intensely American in every line, and express as much American history as George Bancroft was able to express in his great literary work. Architecture is not architecture which does not express history. St. Paul’s Cathedral in London is strictly Renaissance, yet who shall say it is not original, that it is not English Renaissance, and architecture above everything?
The Renaissance of America has as much if not more local color than that of Great Britain. And I do not believe there is an architectural scholar in the country who would have the hardihood to declare the vast treasure house of English Renaissance to be a weak imitation of an older school.
No, I cannot clearly make out what the promoters of the newly invented modes of building expect to teach us. There are two lines of poetry wholly irrelevant to architecture, but so irresistibly significant of the propositions of “New Art” in all its guises, that I may not do better than append them here, to wit:
“He might be taught by love[3] and her together—
I really don’t know what, nor Julia either.”
Don Juan, Canto I, LXXXI.