Still further on, crowning an eminence, stands a huge mausoleum, a noble building designed by Hawksmoor (Fig. 153). It rests on a lofty and spacious platform of irregular symmetry, whereon the friends and tenants of deceased earls may have gathered to await the arrival of the funeral procession as it made its slow way along the grass walks, and after halting at the temple, wound across the rolling fields. Long stone benches suggest the scores of horsemen who dismounted and left their horses to be tended on the ample spaces of the platform. The mausoleum itself is a circular domed building, surrounded by disengaged columns; within it are two chambers; the lower level with the platform, contains the vaults; the upper is the chapel. The latter is approached by long flights of steps, and is itself circular and covered at a great height with a coffered dome. The sweep of the walls within is relieved by eight recesses for an altar, the clergy, and the chief mourners. The vaulted apartment below is massively constructed, and in the thickness of the masonry are contrived many recesses for the reception of coffins. But few have been utilised, and, as the visitor discovers by the light of his taper cavern after cavern still unoccupied and unlikely ever to be filled, as he stands in the chilly spaces of the chapel with its dome soaring far overhead, as he gazes from an angle of the platform across the fields and the grass-grown bridge on to the distant house (Fig. 149), he realises how vastly things have changed, how entirely this fine conception has lost its point, how empty is the pomp of architecture when the habits to which it ministered have ceased. [Illustration: FIG. 151.--CASTLE HOWARD. THE HALL.] [Illustration: FIG. 152.--CASTLE HOWARD. THE TAPESTRY ROOM.] [Illustration: FIG. 153.--The Mausoleum at Castle Howard, as seen from the Platform on which it stands.]