=Roofs.=--Many Gothic features were preserved. Oriel and bay windows were frequent, and the windows retain their mullions and transoms, and increase in size, being often carried up through several stories. Square or octagonal towers abound, occasionally battlemented but generally finishing in a parapet or cresting, the roof being concealed or rising in a low cone or pyramid. Similarly, the main roofs vary; high, flat, and low ones even occurring in the same design. They are covered with lead or tiles, and surrounded by balustrades, formed of battlements, successive arches, or pierced ornament. Gables are edged with scroll-work, while dormer-gables, as in the Netherlands and Germany, are stepped or carried up with variously curved outlines. The chimneys, single or grouped in stacks, continue to be a prominent feature, their decoration, occasionally, as at Kirby and Hatfield, involving a use of orders. =Use of Orders.=--The orders when applied to the façade, are treated with little regard to purity of style and are often disfigured with strap ornament. When used in interior decoration, the pilasters frequently diminish in width toward the base, or swell out in bulbous curves; there being little or no limit to the extravagance of form that columns and pilasters alike assume in chimneypieces and furniture. Indeed, during the Jacobean period the grotesqueness of ornament notably increased, accompanied by a corresponding coarseness in the modelling. Moreover, this characteristic invaded the gardens, where trees and hedges were trimmed or “pleached” into the shape of birds, or beasts, or fantastic designs. However, although the mansions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods will not stand scrutiny on the score of architectural propriety, they have besides their picturesqueness a quality that is aptly characterised in Cowper’s phrase, “the stately homes of England.” They possess dignity and, above all, are homelike. They bear the stamp, not of the professional architect, but of the variegated family life that they have fostered for successive generations.