adorned with false pediments of capricious outline and strapwork ornamentation, flanked by obelisks on tall pedestals. One other feature of this remarkable design is perhaps worthy of notice, namely, the portal of the north front. This portal has a low arch, and is sheltered by a porch in the form of a massive free-standing Doric order, the shafts of which are broken in the middle by a salient drum, and the middle of the entablature is supported by a heavy console which forms, at the same time, a monstrous keystone to the arch (Fig. 132).
Fig. 132.—Portal of Wollaton Hall.
It is unnecessary further to multiply examples. While one great house of the period differs from another in unimportant ways, those in which ornaments are extensively applied are without exception disfigured by them. The Elizabethan architectural ornamentation is at once pretentious and grotesquely ugly. It was only in so far as they held to a straightforward provision for domestic needs, and avoided architectural pretensions, that the English people of the Elizabethan Age produced really good domestic architecture.
Toward the close of the sixteenth century many Flemish and Dutch ornamental workers had come into England, and had brought in the tasteless forms of design that had been current with them. The ungrammatical and inelegant misuse of the orders, and the meaningless barocco scrollwork, with which the Elizabethan houses were overloaded, may be largely due to them. But these modes of design were readily assimilated by the native English workmen, and approved by the aristocratic English taste. The architect, in the more modern sense, did not yet exist. The design and execution of these buildings were in
