Vanbrugh’s houses may be taken as the highest manifestation of the spirit of the age in house building; the exaltation of social grandeur, the scenic magnificence of architecture. That they rather missed the mark in respect of comfort and convenience, as we understand those qualities, was not held to be a great drawback. Yet even contemporary voices were raised in protest, as may be gathered from Pope’s verses on “The Duke of Marlborough’s House at Woodstock,” wherein, after listening to an admirer’s description of its splendour, he suddenly interrupts him:-- “Thanks, Sir, I cried, ’tis very fine, But where d’ye sleep, or where d’ye dine? I find by all you have been telling, That ’tis a house, but not a dwelling.” [Illustration: FIG. 156.--STOWE, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE. VIEW OF QUEEN’S THEATRE, FROM THE ROTUNDA. From an Engraving by Jean Rigaud.] Sir Joshua Reynolds, in the thirteenth of his admirable Discourses, remarks that Vanbrugh “was defrauded of the due reward of his merit by the wits of the time”; and we can heartily concur in his opinion as a painter, that Vanbrugh, “had originality of invention, he understood light and shade, and had great skill in composition.” In all these great houses the lay out helped the general effect; the gardens and the groves were designed in the same spirit as the houses which they surrounded. Those at Stowe were the most famous of their time. There was but little formality about them, although they were traversed by a few straight walks and vistas (Fig. 156). They embodied, indeed, the new idea which eschewed formality, and sought to gain the help of nature without apparent effort (Fig. 157). They covered a considerable amount of space, and were diversified by undulations of varied steepness, and by great masses of trees. The landscape thus provided by nature was improved by art. A stream was made to fall here, to wind there, to broaden out into a lake elsewhere. Paths were contrived to pass through thickets, to descend a dell, to curve beneath a lofty mound crowned with a “temple,” to undulate along the edge of a copse and overlook meadows sloping down to the lake. The whole was studded at intervals with buildings, each of which had a character of its own. There were grottoes, temples, arches, rotundas, and columns, designed by Vanbrugh, Leoni, Kent, and others. They were so placed amid the trees, the meadows, and the water as to remind the spectator of pictures of Italian scenery. Half Italy was squeezed into two hundred acres of English countryside. A Corinthian arch admitted the principal approach from Buckingham. There were many temples; among them one to Venus, one to Bacchus, others to the Ancient Virtues, to the Modern Virtues (in ruins--a costly piece of satire which must speedily have palled), to British worthies, to Concord and Victory, to Friendship and to other deities and abstractions. There was Dido’s cave in one place,