Even at such times there were some who were proof against the caprice of fashionable taste, and who were not insensible to the solemn grandeur of ‘high embowed roofs,’ ‘massy pillars,’ and ’storied windows.’[847] Lord Lyttelton censured the old architecture as ’loaded with a multiplicity of idle and useless parts,’ yet granted that ’upon the whole it has a mighty awful air, and strikes you with reverence.’[848] Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster was still regarded with admiration as ’that wonder of the world;’[849] and although people did not quite know what to do with their cathedrals, and regarded them rather as curiosities, alien to the times, and heirlooms from a dead past, they did not cease to speak of them with some pride.  But popular taste—­so far as architectural taste can be spoken of as prevalent in any definite form throughout the greater part of the last century—­was all in favour of a ‘Palladian’ or ‘Greek’ style.  It was a style scarcely adapted to our climate, and unfavourable to the symbolism of Christian thought, yet capable, in the hands of a master, of being very grand and imposing.  Under weaker treatment the effect was grievous.  There was neither manliness nor solemnity in the usual run of churches built after the similitude of ’Roman theatres and Grecian fanes.’[850] Maypoles instead of columns, capitals of no order, and pie-crust decorations—­such, exclaimed Seward,[851] were the too frequent adjuncts of the newly built churches he saw about him.  At the time, however, that Seward wrote, a change had already begun to show itself in many influential quarters.  Even the ‘correct classicality’ of Sir William Chambers,[852] the leading architect of the day, met, towards the close of the century, with by no means the same unquestioning admiration which he had received at an earlier date.  There was division of opinion on fundamental questions of architectural fitness; and persons could applaud the talents of mediaeval builders without being considered eccentric.  Gray, Mason, Warton, Bishop Percy, and many others, had contributed in various ways to create in England a reaction, still more widely felt in Germany, in favour of ideas which for some time past had been contemptuously relegated to the darkness of the Middle Ages.  A frequent, though as yet not very discriminating, approval of Gothic[853] architecture was part of the movement.  ‘High veneration,’ remarked Dr. Sayers, writing about the last year of the century, ’has lately been revived for the pointed style.’[854] It was one among many other outward signs of a change gradually coming over the public mind on matters concerned with the observances of religion.