200 ifcinss of tbe 1Rot>, 1Rtfle t ant) 6un 



the ugliest, it is internally the w0.tf comfortable house 

 in England. 



That it should be something out of the common way 

 was only to be expected from the time and thought and 

 money expended upon the building of it. Thomas 

 Coke, after long consultations with his friend the Earl 

 of Burlington, the accomplished virtuoso of Burlington 

 House, and that nobleman's brilliant henchman William 

 Kent, painter, sculptor, architect, and landscape gardener, 

 commenced building his great "pleasure-house" in 1734 

 from designs by Inigo Jones, based upon the happiest 

 efforts of the great sixteenth-century Italian architect 

 Andrea Palladio. When, ten years later, Thomas Coke 

 was raised to the peerage as Viscount Coke of Holkham 

 and Earl of Leicester, the elaborately planned mansion 

 in Norfolk was still far from being ready for habitation. 

 And, indeed, though the Earl lived to inhabit his 

 splendid house, he never saw it finished, for it was 

 not till five years after his death and thirty years from 

 the laying of the foundation stone that Holkham House 

 was finally completed by his widowed Countess. 



Over the entrance door of the fine Egyptian Hall, 

 from which the rest of the noble suite of state apart- 

 ments radiate, is the following inscription : 



This seat, on an open and barren estate, was planned, 

 decorated, and inhabited, the middle of the eighteenth 

 century, by Thomas Coke, Earl of Leicester. 



Probably it never occurred to the said Thomas Coke, 

 Earl of Leicester, that he could do anything better to 

 improve his " open and barren estate " than build upon 

 it this " sumptuous edifice." That the poor and miser- 



