So far as our present conception of a home is concerned, the time of Elizabeth may be held to have seen its birth; for, although the English house has an ancestry which goes back to the Conquest, yet it was in Elizabeth’s days that houses were first built almost exclusively for pleasure and delight. Hers was a great age of house building. Peace, wealth, and security from serious turmoil led men in all parts of the country to reconstruct their old homes or to build new ones; and records remain, either in actual buildings or in old plans, of houses of every size, from the great palaces of Burghley or Hatton wherein they entertained their sovereign, down to the little house, not forty feet square, which was devised for Sir Walter Raleigh in St James’s. Much pains and great skill were expended in contriving these houses so that they should be convenient and well-looking. The planning of them was in the nature of a new experiment, for there was no precedent, either of extent or disposition, which was exactly to the point. The treatment of the exterior--in other words, their style of architecture--was also something fresh; for it became the fashion, gradually increasing in extent, to seek inspiration in this direction from Italy, a country which for more than a century had produced most marvellous buildings, both as to conception and as to the lovely detail with which they were embellished. This new demand in regard to style was partly met by inviting foreign workmen to this country, and partly by sending English designers to study in Italy; but the knowledge thus acquired was utilised by our native craftsmen in their own way. It influenced them, but did not enslave them. At first it puzzled them, with the result that much hybrid work was done which would have astonished both their Gothic forefathers and their Italian contemporaries, but which nevertheless has an attractive piquancy of its own. This tentative stage lasted well into the seventeenth century, until the knowledge and genius of Inigo Jones, most ably seconded by John Webb, gradually wrought a revolution, and English architecture freed itself from the pleasant inaccuracies of its earlier exponents. It is at the time when the old order was beginning to give way to the new that the story of the English House is taken up in the following pages. It will be pursued through the next two centuries. We shall see how the crude ideas of Elizabethan and Jacobean architects were mellowed under the influence of Inigo Jones; how John Webb carried on his master’s teaching through the disturbed years of the Civil War; how wealthy men, following the lead of the Earl of Arundel, indulged their growing taste for collecting antiques, pictures, and other works of art. Houses will be described and pictured in which Evelyn and Pepys must have watched many of the events which they record in their pages.