But apart from their effect upon the public, the insight which these drawings give into the inner working of the designers’ minds is of great interest. Besides the finished drawings there are innumerable sketches for plans, elevations, and details, as well as many scraps copied from Italian books on architecture, notably from Serlio. Comparing these and Jones’s own sketches with similar memoranda and sketches by Italian architects of the period, it is curious to find how thoroughly he adopted their particular methods of work, and after him Webb likewise. Everything is classic in style, all the proportions are carefully worked out. The lengths and heights of buildings are not the result of caprice, or chance, or even primarily of convenience, but of systems of proportion. So also in the plans: these are largely adaptations of Italian models, not only in their formality and symmetry, but also in the disposition of the rooms. There is nothing haphazard, fortuitous, or rambling about them: they are the result of carefully considered proportion. Every house was complete in itself, and to be altered or enlarged afterwards was to be spoilt. This sort of precision had a natural tendency to become mechanical, and in later years, notably in the early part of the eighteenth century, the tendency asserted itself strongly. But it is interesting to find that the foibles of Campbell, Gibbs, and their contemporaries had their justification in the work of Jones and Webb. It was more particularly Webb who founded himself so carefully on definite proportions. Jones had a natural instinct for good proportion. His studies of the human figure and of drapery, his construction of scenery for masques, gave him freedom of touch and sureness in achieving the result at which he aimed not to be found in Webb. Jones’s youth had been passed in that atmosphere of freedom and joyous fancy in house design which was characteristic of Elizabethan days. The intelligent ignorance with which Italian detail was treated he set himself to correct; but he did not altogether crush out its light-heartedness. His own work, although purer and more severe than that of his predecessors, retained something of their freedom. [Illustration: FIG. 44.--DESIGN FOR A HOUSE, BY JOHN WEBB. From the Burlington-Devonshire Collection at the R.I.B.A.] The same, but in a less degree, may be said of Webb. Immersed though he seems to have been in his endeavours to saturate himself with the true rules of proportion, when he came to put his ideas into execution, he showed a pretty play of natural fancy, and much of his detail has a freshness and individuality sadly lacking in the work of fifty years later.