Smithson’s house-plans are of great interest, inasmuch as they belong to the order of things which was shortly to pass away. Some of them follow the traditional lines which made the hall the principal apartment of the house, placing it between the family rooms and the servants’ quarters. The plan “for My Lord Sheffield’s house” is an example of this arrangement (Fig. 14). It shows the rooms grouped in the old way round a courtyard, which had to be traversed in approaching the hall from the front door. The hall itself was entered through the screens at its lower end, and was flanked at its upper end by the parlour and other family rooms, and by the grand staircase. On the opposite side of the court were the kitchen, pantry, and other rooms for the service of the house. In the four corners of the court were square turrets containing subsidiary staircases. On the upper floor (Fig. 14) the chief rooms were the dining-chamber, placed as far from the kitchen as the limits of the house would allow, and the long gallery. The fact of a special room being set apart for dining itself indicates a fairly late date in respect of this ancient type of plan. As my Lord Sheffield was created Earl of Mulgrave in 1626, the plan must be prior to that year, but the house was probably not more than ten years old when the change of title took place. [Illustration: FIG. 16.--Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire. The Riding-House.] The other specimen of Smithson’s planning is one of the H type, with the hall in one of the wings (Fig. 15). This is a departure from the old arrangement, which would have placed the hall in the central block, and thus have brought the buttery (which opens from the screens) into close touch with the kitchens. The hall becomes here more of a passage-room and less of a living-room than under the ancient disposition. There are no sitting-rooms for the family on the ground floor, but the principal staircase leads to the great chamber on the upper floor, thence to the long gallery and a distant “withdrawing-chamber,” as well as to the chapel and several bedrooms. [Illustration: FIG. 17.--Elevation of a House, not named. From the Smithson Collection.] Both these houses are rigidly symmetrical in their external treatment, and it is interesting to note how, in addition to preserving such old-established rooms as the great chamber and long gallery, they depend for their external effect upon old features, such as mullioned windows, arcaded entrances, turrets, and the breaking up of the various fronts with substantial projections and large bay-windows. These devices were customary among the designers of the time of Elizabeth and James I., but they were gradually to be superseded by other methods.