The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-11-12
ENGLAND's COUNTRY HOUSES

IENGLAND'S COUNTRY HOUSES Great Palaces Built and the Art Treas
 ures They Hold.
 Last week one of the finest houses in
 England and one which holds unique
 place in the sentiment of the population
 of the Midlands narrowly escaped de-
 struction by fire. Welbeck Abbey d.
 vides with Warwick Castle and Chats
 worth the admiration naturally felt for
 a splendid house, full of treasures of
 art, and set In the finest of gardens and
 parks, by a population shut up, for the
 most part, in large manufacturing
 towns. In the words of one of the local
 histories, Welbeck lis not a show place,
 but only a private palace"
 Gibbon after visiting Paris and Yer
 sailles, concluded that the "splendor of
 the French nobles was confined to their 1 town residences" That of the Eng
 lish," he remarks, "is more usefully dis
 tributed in their country seats; and we
 should be astonished at our own riches | if the labors of architecture and the
 spells of Italy and Greece, which are
 now scattered from Inverary to Wilton,
 were accumulated in few streets be-
 tween Marylebone and Westminster" |" If one in four of these great houses stood on the area which Gibbon sug- gests, London would not only be a city of palaces, but of palaces not less mag niticent and more richly stored with the trumphs of the brush and the chisel than those of the towns of modern
 Itaq. If all the paintings in Paris and Florence were destroyed there would still be enough in the English country houses to present a full and brilliant se-
 quence of the triumphs of Continental art. The best work of the English school, the ever-increasing money value of which Is rough tes of it's worth is found nowhere else. Nine tenths of the paintings of Gainsbor- ough, Romney and Sir Joshua Rey- holds, Crome and Turner, are on the walls. A mere sample of their store of English paintings shown at Paris this year astonished Continental visitors, whose acquaintance with this class of paintings Is limited at most to few rooms in the National Gallery But one collection in a town, such as that at Herford House, makes more stir than 800 scattered in as many park-set country houses just as abroad the col leetions in one of two Dutch private houses at The Hague or Amsterdam are better known than the contents of the Escural among it's granite hills,
 What is often least appreciated about the great country homes Is the quality of the houses themselves, Their sig nificance as storehouses of art has been acknowledged if not fully realized. But they have never had due 1 honor as works of the architect and builder. Whatever the changes in tase and style, | the builders have never fallen short of | the highest standard of material and | work. It Is no injustice to the con- struction of the Elizabethian era to say | that there has been steady improve | ment in this respect in the structural | excellence of the country palaces of the | first and second magnitude since the | days when the owners of Hatfield and 1 Audley End looked through the plans submitted to them. The frank adoption 1f the Palladian style, which took the place of the Tudor Renaissance, de- nanded and received a solidity and which the early buildings lid not need. The jokes made at Van orugh's expense, were, perhaps justi- fed by the ponderous look of his work. But there are some three hundred Ital- an palaces, stone without and stone md marble within, which would stand, wen if roofless for thousand years as evidence of the thoroughness of the work put into them.
 Buildings like Houghton, or Stowe, 1T Woodburn, or Wentworth Wode- lous are like vast stone quarries. Cost las never been considered. The para ,ets, colonnades, roof, pillars and pedi- nents were cut and joined to last for III time. There is something rather dmrable in the qualities of mind which would permit nothing unsound 10 scamping of work or shirking of ost in any one part or detail of their abltation. DisraelPs joke about the uke who was always afraid of underbuilding his position" has an- ther side to it's meaning There Is and lWays has been, among the leading ,nglish owners very strong sense hat the house is reflection of the ian, Taste might differ in design But here were no two ways of looking at ne execution. That, they always in- sted, should be as good as it could be. lany of these houses give the impress m that they could never need repairs. Fire is the only thing which destroys lem and their irreplaceable art treas- res. But they generally rise anew, ven more splendid than of old. All trough this reign stars of the first lcond and third magnitude have con antly been added to the country luse Armament. Those built early in le "40s' and "50s" were more remark