U FURTHER ADVANCES FROM EARLIER TYPE 



concerns us at present. Kings Weston is advanced as illustrating, 

 not so much Vanbrugh's style, as the complete departure from 

 the old ways which architectural design had by this time taken. 

 The date of Kings Weston is about 1715. It is not only in 

 the external appearance that this departure is noticeable, but 

 also in the plan, and in the internal embellishments. These 

 points will be dealt with fully in due course, but even on look- 

 ing at the outside of Kings Weston, it is obvious that it is 

 disposed on lines widely different from those of a Jacobean 

 house. 



These differences are still more apparent in the next illus- 

 tration of the series, Wolterton Hall, in Norfolk (Fig. 8). This 

 house is attributed to Ripley, and its date is put at 1736. 

 It is staid and eminently respectable, but there is none of 

 the picturesqueness of the Jacobean methods about it, none of 

 those unexpected human touches which help us to condone the 

 ignorance of classic detail exhibited by Jacobean designers ; no 

 " accident," as Sir Joshua Reynolds puts it, which might lead to 

 variety or intricacy. In making the circuit of its walls, the 

 visitor knows exactly what he is likely to find. The appeal is 

 to narrower sympathies than of old, to sympathies which spring 

 from an acquired feeling for proportion, and are not merely 

 roused by quaint personal incidents attractive to all alike, 

 whether trained in architecture or not. The dignified effect is 

 produced by the stone base, the proportion of the windows in 

 relation to the wall space, and the bold cornice at the eaves. 

 The chimneys are symmetrically placed, but they have had no 

 design worthy of the name bestowed upon them. 



At Fonthill House, in Wiltshire, built about 1760 (Fig. 9), 

 there is a reversion to a type of plan which had almost died out, 

 a central block, namely, with detached wings connected to it by 

 curved colonnades. This type had been frequently adopted in 

 the earlier part of the eighteenth century, and was still advocated 

 in some of the text-books on house design. But its obvious 

 inconveniences in dissipating the forces of domestic service instead 

 of concentrating them, so far outweighed the advantages of 

 stateliness and grandeur which it bestowed, that it fell into 

 disuse. Fonthill House was built by Alderman Beckford in 

 succession to a house which was burnt in 1755, and it is doing 

 the alderman no injustice to suppose that he strove to make his 

 new house a very splendid affair, and accordingly adopted a 



