a Chatsworth or a Castle Howard. These and their like will pass into the condition of Leonardos and Rembrandts, of which one may at any time expire by fire or senile decay, but no more can in any way be born. For the attitude of Hamlet towards marriage in a dislocated Denmark is that of our impoverished and irritated age and nation towards these monumental expressions of individual wealth and complacency; those that are built shall remain, but let there be no more of such buildings. The whole chapter is written; we read it with some touch of the tenderness due to a mighty plan that must now abide by whatever befell it in the course of its execution. We trace with gusto the growth of the country house from the early medieval family fortress to the late medieval manor-house like Haddon; and then on, through the stately and yet home-like and lovable Elizabethanism of Montacute, Longleat and Knole and the heavier grandeurs compiled by Vanbrugh and Inigo Jones, to such modern confessions of artistic embarrassment as Waterhouse's Eaton Hall.

Of course the coming architects will have great things to do. If no one will ever build for himself in London another Somerset House, still the London County Council's new riverain home is a pretty large load for any one man to be commissioned to lay upon the earth. The new cathedral at Liverpool is to be larger than either St. Paul's or York Minster: St. Peter's alone will be larger. Our railways have scarcely begun to build ambitious terminal stations as the Americans do. If" big business" ever picks up enough strength, in a lean post

war world, to resume its practice of growing bigger and bigger by eating little businesses up, we may yet have an English firm giving to an architect a job as wonderful as Nash's commission to design all Regent Street. The possibilities opened to art by the modern rebirth of " townplanning" are glorious. are glorious. Only the major country mansion seems likely to atrophy. Soon such deposits as Audley End, Burghley and Blenheim may come to be cherished as documents recording a social state as incapable of revival as those which left for their expressive monuments the Pyramids and the Parthenon.

The old feudal England, beautiful and somewhat naughty in her day as some old women have been in their prime, died of malnutrition during the war. A handsome old witch, hard and game to the last, she had long been bedridden and lean as a rake, but always rouged herself to see the doctor and flouted fate with a will. We may think of her now with Mary Stuart and Cleopatra and Helen, ladies whose looks were so good and their frailties so sturdy that time itself has been corrupted into giving them a kind of shrift and admitting them to a calendar, not exactly of saints, but of supremely piquant awakeners of imagination. I stood the other day in the great court of a monastic-looking private house to which Charles II. once bolted to get away from the Plague which his subjects and neighbours in London were then more or less manfully facing. The great yews near me had their roots wrapped round the bones of the yet older chantry with which a Plantagenet King had sought to bribe God to connive at his having acquired his throne through a murder. Over

head, on a roof, there swaggered a monstrous stone heraldic beast that had looked down from another roof at the bonfires blazing beside Charing Cross for the Stuart Restoration and then for the acquittal of the seven bishops and then for the coming of William and Mary. The vast house was empty, its blinds down, its doors rigidly closed. So it remained through all the years of a generation except on two midsummer days in each year. On these its owner gave two garden parties, the blinds were opened and guests flitting through rooms and corridors. glanced hastily at the masterpieces of the brothers Adam interned in this damp fastness. In all that unused place there was no sound now except the whispering plash of a thin fountain playing in the middle of the court and the tread of a sparrow on dry fallen leaves. Outside, the park, forbidden to all, seemed almost to moulder on this autumn afternoon with derelict stillness, a kind of inanition, the lapsing of some functionless organ into decay. Beyond its walls children, I knew, wriggled and snarled in the cramped slums of a slatternly town that had always seemed to live languidly and grimily under the shadow of this huge house, like the grass under a tree that keeps rain and dew out. All horrible, in a way, all crying out to be changed and made unwasteful and fair. And yet something works through men's meanness and greed as well as their generosity,

Brings freedom with the tyrant's chains

And wisdom with the fool.

The jealous vanity of a rich family, void of comradeship

66

with countrymen and neighbours, had built up, cell by cell, the sinister, sequestered beauty of this solitude islanded in the midst of crowds. Some unseen producer," as it were, had transmuted into a thing of delicate melancholy and pensive charm this sum of many centuries' expression of a tawdry pride and a timorous instinct of exclusion. The heaviest tombs beside the Appian Way can in some sense appeal to us, even while we feel that they were somewhat sorry souls who put up those hulking bids for immortality. Like Louis's Versailles and Wolsey's Hampton Court, the country houses of the English "ruling class," now almost dispossessed, may be finer than their makers. As rulers these have possibly failed; but as foxes or rabbits engaged in the immemorial task of making themselves as snug as they could, they mastered their job and did wonders. They must have given themselves some marvellous days in the air and nights at the table and even in the library. To-day, as your eye wanders over their ranges of stables and cellars, the cunning, long-disused ice-houses half interred in their parks, the generous scale of their kennels, the amplitude of their open fire-places, their kitchens and gun-rooms, you can regret nothing. For you would be worse off to-day if you were without the idea you get from these things of the measure of man's iron will and versatile power to give himself a good time. That any one should ever have done that particular thing so shrewdly well enlarges your vision of human accomplishment.

THE FACES AND FORTUNES OF CITIES

There, where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

TENNYSON.

A

I

NY one can perceive the historical fragrance of places like Winchelsea and Montreuil, Ravenna and Rye. Once on a time they were ports with the sea deep at their quays; the sea made them great. Now they are far inland: in none of them will you hear on the roughest day the sound of a wave. The sea gave and the sea has taken away. Yet they survive, pensioned off as it were, and living, in a modest way, a pensive and dignified life, like the old soldiers at Chelsea. Long sequestered from the hustle and racket of the central stream of urban progress, they sit apart in their archaic clothes, quietly brood in the sun and tell stories of their great youth to the eager amateurs of the antique who come to converse with them.

Yet their cases are not singular; only a little extreme. The special causes that once made a site peculiarly good for a town are always passing away and giving place to causes which make some other site better. It is not the sea alone that recedes. London herself, as well as Rye, has long survived the state of things which caused her to be exactly where she is. On London Bridge, as well as on the ramparts of Montreuil, which once had the sea at their feet, you may feast your fill upon thoughts about the