Melton Constable stands in a park amid the undulations of the western part of Norfolk. It is a fine simple house of about the year 1680 (Fig. 131). The eaves cornice gives it its chief character; the rest of the detail is correct, but strikes the modern eye as being a little hackneyed; but this is the fault, not of the original architect but of his successors, who, if they did not copy this actual work, drew, one after the other, upon the same well of inspiration. These examples serve to illustrate the progress of house design during the later years of the seventeenth century; they show how the fully developed classic manner had superseded the homely treatment of Jacobean times. Its further career of grandeur and stateliness demands a fresh chapter for its consideration. [Illustration: FIG. 131.--MELTON CONSTABLE, NORFOLK.] VIII GREAT HOUSES AND GARDENS OF THE EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Twenty-five years after his restoration Charles II. died; James II. passed uneasily across the scene to his inglorious exit, and William and Mary succeeded him on the throne. But it is not to the sovereigns that we must look as pioneers in house building, although at Greenwich and Hampton Court fine work was accomplished. It is rather to the great nobles, or at least to aristocratic and wealthy families, that we owe the most notable specimens of domestic architecture of the time. At this period the gulf between the upper and lower classes was wide and deep: its widening was perhaps one of the reactions from the conditions of the Commonwealth when many persons of humble origin fought their way to eminence. The distance between the heads of a great household and their retainers had been increasing all through the century; the increase has already been indicated in the type of plan adopted by Jones and Webb. The great hall, where the whole family used to meet on common ground and with common objects, had disappeared. The great noble of Elizabeth’s time lived among his retainers; the grandee under William and Mary relegated his servants to a distant part of the building or to the basement. The great ones of the land now housed themselves in splendid buildings, and surrounded themselves with splendid gardens. Nobody grumbled; the whole community concurred in this exaltation of birth combined with wealth. Men whose names to us are household words sought the patronage of others whose names and doings are hardly recorded outside the pages of the “Complete Peerage.” Manners, customs, dress emphasised this condition at the time; architecture reflects it to-day. [Illustration: FIG. 132.--Boughton House, Northamptonshire. Plan of the Upper Story, 1736. From a Plan preserved in the house.