The man who did more than anyone else to bring learning to bear on design, and to introduce into England a true and correct knowledge of Italian detail, was that great artist, Inigo Jones. His first architectural work of importance was the Banqueting House at Whitehall, which was finished in 1622. It has no trace of traditional English design about it (see Fig. 22). To us it appears a beautiful building, but by no means abnormal, because we can see many others of the same type. But to those who saw it when it was just built, it was something entirely novel, something in which they sought in vain for any of the customary devices for producing architectural effect. Doubtless it was a stimulant, but it did not revolutionise English architecture. Indeed, it was only Inigo Jones, and after him his pupil John Webb, who could pretend to work on such learned lines. The ordinary surveyors--of whom there must have been a large number, although their names have not survived--still worked in the hybrid style in which they had been trained, with the result that such a house as Aston Hall, near Birmingham, which was completed in 1635, is thoroughly Jacobean in character (Fig. 2), although of sufficient importance to have warranted the adoption of the latest ideas in design, had they been at all widespread. There is one point, however, in which Aston Hall shows the impending change in house-planning, and that is the disposition of the great hall. It is entered in the middle of one side, instead of through screens at the end, thus making a large vestibule of it instead of a living-room. The same treatment is to be found in some of the plans of John Smithson, an eminent architect of the time; and an examination of his drawings will presently be undertaken, in order to illustrate the steps which led from the Jacobean style to the more fully developed classic. Nothing illustrates this change more aptly than a comparison between Smithson’s drawings and those of Inigo Jones and John Webb. The first are Jacobean, the second are classic. In the Jacobean are seen efforts to sever the ties which ancient traditions still imposed; a striving after Italian detail, which was never thoroughly achieved; a mixture of a little old-fashioned romance, with a little new-fashioned learning. In the classic are seen an ignoring of tradition; a mastery of Italian methods; a mixture of sound knowledge with a feeling for good proportion. As an illustration of the first large building in England conceived in the fully developed classic style, nothing could be better than the drawing made by Thomas Sandby about the middle of the eighteenth century, showing how the great palace designed for Charles I. would have appeared (see Fig. 1). It is also interesting in connection with the inquiry into the Jones and Webb drawings, which will be fully dealt with in Chapter IV.