218 CASTLE HOWARD, YORKSHIRE 



fortified with general approval the design was carried out, the 

 works extending over some thirty years. The cost must have 

 been very great, and in a later letter Vanbrugh tells how it was 

 met in part, for in July 1707 he says that Lord Carlisle had 

 " won 2,000 from the Sharpers, and is gone down to lay it out 

 in his buildings." l 



Although the whole of Vanbrugh's design \vas not carried out 

 the house is of great size and of palatial magnificence (Fig. 1 50). 

 Indeed no modern person can be incessantly as grand as the 

 grandeur of the building demands. It requires innumerable 

 servants to keep it in order, innumerable guests to make it 

 cheerful. It involves a great drain upon the owner's resources, 

 both of temperament and of purse, to fill it with enough people 

 to prevent its being dull, and to maintain it in suitable repair 

 and tidiness. From a practical standpoint the corridors are too 

 many and are out of all proportion to the rooms they serve. 

 There are indeed no rooms of a size commensurate with the 

 outside grandeur ; most of them appear small and narrow, their 

 height is as great as their width (Fig. 152), and this must have 

 tended, before the introduction of modern heating, to make them 

 cold. The finest apartment is the hall (Fig. 151), so large and 

 lofty as to occupy an undue proportion of space compared with 

 what is devoted to domestic use. Its effect is more nearly allied 

 to what we are accustomed to associate with a large museum or 

 other public building than with a house. 



The view in " Vitruvius Britannicus" does more justice to 

 Vanbrugh's conception than does the building itself. The house 

 is there shown with a subsidiary court on each side, one being 

 devoted to laundries and so forth, and the other to stables. In 

 front there was to have been a forecourt enclosed by a 

 monumental fence with the main entrance gates on the axial 

 line. Actually but one of the side courts was built, and the 

 forecourt was not carried out. The road, instead of approaching 

 the house directly opposite to the centre of the facade, thus 

 giving the visitor a coup d'ceil of the whole vast composition, 

 approaches it laterally, close to the end of one of the wings, and 

 it is only on passing the corner of the wing that the visitor is 

 suddenly aware at close quarters of the recessed entrance front. 



The one subsidiary court which was built contains the 

 laundries, and it is in the nature of a shock to see laundry-maids 



1 "Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne," 1864, p. 227. 



