"Its main front is a lightened or Adamized version of the center of the south front of Somerset House, which in a letter to the legislative committee Bulfinch referred to as "a building celebrated all over Europe," while its largest interior, the Representatives Hall, follows in all essentials the Great Room in Wyatt's Pantheon, a fact not mentioned by Bulfinch to the committee... The Massachusetts State House was much admired from the first, and the fact that a central dome became an almost universal feature of American state houses is due at least as mcuh to its example as to that of the national capitol.

— Marcus Whiffen and Frederick Koeper, American Architecture, 1860-1976, p109-110.