Despite this, the Fountain Court is one of the successful features of the Palace, which reveals Wren’s sanity and dignity and Englishness in a most convincing way. It is enough to look at Chatsworth, in the light of Hampton Court, to realize the difference between pedantry and genius. Norman Shaw so greatly admired Hampton Court, that he would have followed it in Whitehall, if he had been entrusted with the Government offices. The weakest part of the Palace is the pedimented garden front, where a sense of display, due perhaps to Royal Command, contrasts with the greater simplicity of the return façade towards the Tudor garden. [Illustration: PLATE X HAMPTON COURT: WREN’S TWO FRONTS.] Hampton Court, for all its size, is a gentleman’s house rather than a palace, and Wren’s treatment of the smaller rooms fills a marked place in the development of the English interior. Left more to himself, Wren would have been more English in the height of his rooms. He had a sense of fitness which is of the essence of good architecture. Wren was unlucky at Hampton Court in more than in one of his clients. His Comptroller (or, as we should say, Clerk) of the Works was William Talman, who accused him of having passed bad work. Some masonry showed cracks, and enough stir was created to lead the House of Lords to order an enquiry. Wren was exonerated, and with characteristic generosity he did not call, as he might well have done, for the dismissal of a disloyal assistant. Time has revenged him. Chatsworth shows Talman to have been a heavy-handed fellow, but he is also remembered as a bad colleague in other things than the Hampton Court accusation. If visitors to the Palace should feel that Wren failed in giving a suitable approach to the State apartments, they should remember that they are in the presence of an incomplete scheme, and that he left a design of notable splendour for wings with colonnades at the north side. The incidental furnishings of avenues took shape in the chestnuts of Bushey Park, but the rest remained on paper. In one detail of the gardens Wren must have taken special pleasure. The marvellous iron screens by Tijou have been moved from their original position, but they remain to show Wren’s skill in the choice of his craftsmen.