But, unhappily, English life among the upper classes in the sixteenth century was not without sophistication. Many of the great houses were built, not for convenience and propriety, but to gratify a spirit of ostentation and pedantry. False notions of symmetry were allowed to control design at the expense of fitness, and classic details, even more grotesquely disfigured than in Italy and France, and combined with elements of nameless character, began to overlay the walls, and break the sky-lines. The formal regularity and awkward composition of Hardwick, and the ludicrous pseudo-classicism of Burghley House, with its chimneys (Fig. 127) in the form of Doric orders, are among the numerous instances of this. All that offends the eye in the English palatial architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is due to these sophistications, which largely subverted the native good sense and sound craftsmanship. “This was,” says Cunningham, “a style of architecture strangely compounded, and neither in the weak wildness of its combinations, nor in the flimsy variety of its materials, was it made to endure. Plaster, terra-cotta, paint, tiles, wood, iron, and brick, even when united with all the skill of the most exquisite art, cannot long resist the rapid wear and tear of such a humid climate as ours. Those unsubstantial structures, with all their dazzling incrustations, are passed or passing from the earth: nothing is lasting but hard massive stone, impenetrable cement, and scientific combinations.”[147] It ought to be said, however, that whatever flimsiness of material entered into the composition of these buildings was confined to ornamental details, and chiefly to the interiors. The main body of the Elizabethan structure was of solid and well-executed masonry. Mr. Bloomfield points out that these houses were built by Englishmen and ornamented by foreigners.[148] And it is certainly true that in plan and outline they have little foreign character. Most of the plans of the native architect, John Thorpe,[149] appear, indeed, to show a French influence, but in the larger features of the elevation they are English. It is thus in the ornamental details chiefly, which seem to have been wrought in part by foreigners and in part by native craftsmen striving to conform to foreign ideas, that we find the strangest aberrations of design. A few examples will serve to show the character of this art.