Fig. 149.—Castle Howard. View from the Mausoleum.
Fig. 150.—Castle Howard, Yorkshire. The Garden Front, 1702.
The one subsidiary court which was built contains the laundries, and it is in the nature of a shock to see laundry-maids at work amid surroundings almost massive enough for Diocletian himself.
The lay out is of corresponding scenic magnificence. From one direction the house is approached along a far-stretching avenue, which leads up hill and down dale, then beneath a gateway in a long, symmetrically designed range of building crowned with a sturdy pyramid, and so onwards towards a lofty obelisk, the meeting-point of several roads, one of which leads to the house. The formal gardens close to the house surround a large basin, in the midst of which is Atlas bearing up the world, amid the encouragements of four huge tritons who raise great horns towards him across the water. The broad gravel walk along the garden front leads in one direction to the walled fruit gardens; in the other to a smooth grass track which slopes upwards to a copse of beeches. Curving away from this is another grass track which, passing an ordered row of lead figures, comes eventually to a classic temple. Beyond are undulating fields skirting an artificial lake, across which is flung a massive bridge which deserves, even more than that at Wilton, Walpole’s epithet of “theatric,” for it serves no purpose but to adorn the landscape. It spans a sheet of water contrived for little else than to provide the opportunity to build it. Its roadway, deep-grown in grass, leads from nowhere to nowhere. The Palladian bridge at Prior Park, near Bath, illustrated in Fig. [154], is almost an exact replica of that at Wilton.
Still further on, crowning an eminence, stands a huge mausoleum, a noble building designed by Hawksmoor (Fig. [153]). It rests on a lofty and spacious platform of irregular symmetry, whereon the friends and tenants of deceased earls may have gathered to await the arrival of the funeral procession as it made its slow way along the grass walks, and after halting at the temple, wound across the rolling fields. Long stone benches suggest the scores of horsemen who dismounted and left their horses to be tended on the ample spaces of the platform. The mausoleum itself is a circular domed building, surrounded by disengaged columns; within it are two chambers; the lower level with the platform, contains the vaults; the upper is the chapel. The latter is approached by long flights of steps, and is itself circular and covered at a great height with a coffered dome. The sweep of the walls within is relieved by eight recesses for an altar, the clergy, and the chief mourners. The vaulted apartment below is massively constructed, and in the thickness of the masonry are contrived many recesses for the reception of coffins. But few have been utilised, and, as the visitor discovers by the light of his taper cavern after cavern still unoccupied and unlikely ever to be filled, as he stands in the chilly spaces of the chapel with its dome soaring far overhead, as he gazes from an angle of the platform across the fields and the grass-grown bridge on to the distant house (Fig. [149]), he realises how vastly things have changed, how entirely this fine conception has lost its point, how empty is the pomp of architecture when the habits to which it ministered have ceased.
Fig. 151.—CASTLE HOWARD. The Hall.
