]

The architecture of this period corresponded with the richness and pomp
of the costumes. A new style, partly from Italy, partly from dreamland,
was introduced into England during the Tudor and early Jacobean times.
There was lace, and knots and knobs and curious holes, pillars, and
pilasters. The sincerest admirers of antiquity, such as Inigo Jones, who
went to Italy with such good purpose, and there filled his albums with
many exquisite sketches of antique and Renaissance masterpieces,[63]
could not refrain from sometimes introducing Arcady and dreamland into
their architecture. Inigo Jones died before finishing his Whitehall
palace, and we know from his drawings that he intended to embellish the
central circular court with a row of gigantic caryatides representing
Persians, six or seven yards high.[64] A contriver of masks for the
Court, Inigo Jones, was in this way tempted to build palaces, if one may
say so, in _mask-style_. Such houses as Audley End, Hatfield, and
especially Burghley, this last being mostly Elizabethan,[65] are
excellent representations of the architectural tastes of the time; the
thick windowless towers of a former age are replaced by palatial
facades, where countless enormous windows occupy more space in the wall
than the bricks and stones themselves. Not a few people of a
conservative turn of mind were heard to grumble at these novelties: "And
albeit," said Harrison, in 1577, at the very time when Lord Burghley was
busy building his house in Northamptonshire, "that in these daies there
be manie goodlie houses erected in the sundrie quarters of this Iland;
yet they are rather curious to the eie, _like paper worke_ than
substantiall for continuance; whereas such as he [Henry VIII.] did set
up, excel in both and therefore may justlie be preferred farre above all
the rest." But notwithstanding such a threatening prophecy neither at
Burghley nor at Hatfield has the "paper worke" put there been yet blown
away by storm or time, and these houses continue to afford a safe
residence to the descendants of the Cecils. According to Harrison's
judgment the interior of the new houses, no less than the exterior,
testified to a decadence: "Now have we manie chimnies; and yet our
tenderlings complaine of rheumes, catarhs and poses. Then had we none
but reredosses; and our heads did never ake. For as the smoke in those
daies was supposed to be a sufficient hardening of the timber of the
house, so it was reputed