The Mogul building tradition was therefore wholly Indian, only a new departure analogous to that of the Renaissance in Europe. The Hindu builder threw his old structural formulas into the melting-pot, and reshaped them himself, with astonishing constructive skill, in new forms of such fantasy and variety that the European critic, accustomed to the archæological rules of the Renaissance and generally profoundly ignorant of Indian history, finds it difficult to follow them: for while the Renaissance tied down the European master-builder to narrower constructive limits than the Gothic, the changes in craft traditions made by the Muhammadan conquest of India gave the Indian master-builder a new and much wider field for his invention and skill. Especially in the Mogul period the dilettante began to exercise considerable influence upon the design of buildings, but not to the same extent as in Renaissance architecture in Europe. At the beginning of Renaissance architecture the amateur archæologist was admitted into the fraternity of masons, and after a time had so much influence upon building traditions that craftsmanship and design were divorced from each other, with disastrous results, both economic and artistic. The fragments of Greek and Roman building were drawn, measured minutely, written about in countless volumes, and made the models of a correct taste which every builder was bound to accept. The literary amateur who knew his books became the master-builder, and the master-builder, whose creative mind had led the van of civilisation, became a more or less illiterate artisan, whose vocation it was to shape a set of paper patterns to a practical form and supply the technical knowledge which the architect lacked.
There was nothing similar to this process of degenera-
