23 2 I'AKNUAM. 



death of the last of the Oglanders it came to the present owner. 

 During the ownership of the Oglanders (about 1810) a certain 

 part of the old building was destroyed on the west side to make 

 room for some very unmeaning builder's Gothic work. This 

 part has, however, been altered so as to revive some of its 

 ancient beauty by harmonising it with the south-east front 

 remaining from Henry VIII. 's time. 



A strict purist may possibly condemn this alteration as having 

 torn out a page of the history of the place and substituted 

 another for it ; nor can I defend myself from the charge without 

 comparing the present state of that side of the building with 

 the one it replaced. 



There are occasions to which no general rule will apply, and 

 I believe the present is one of them. No one who is not an 

 expert could detect the alterations lately made, and then only by 

 comparing the colour of the stone used in the mullions of two 

 of the windows with that .of the older part of the building. Some 

 of the mullions put in recently have been made of stone worked 

 at the same date as the house, and are, therefore, identical with 

 them, so that no difference is discernible between those and the 

 older windows. 



Previous to 1810 the Hall had been lighted both from the 

 eastern side, in which the windows remain, and from the western 

 one, where the windows only reached to about eight feet from 

 the floor, a pent roof on the side of the house, now occupied by 

 the dining-room, having filled the space beneath these windows 

 to the level of the garden on the outer wall. Their mullions 

 still remain buried in the brickwork, put into the wall to carry 

 the iloor of the room above the present dining-room. One 

 of these western windows has recently been opened, and the 

 mullions can be seen behind the silk above the panelling in 

 the dining-room. All the window mullions put in in 1810 

 had been constructed not of stone but of soft wood, and 

 had become absolutely rotten, whilst the stone windows put 

 there 150 years earlier remained perfectly sound.' Several 

 windows had been plastered up by the Oglanders in 1810 two 



