[Illustration: FIG. 57.--The Latin School, Warminster, Wiltshire, 1707.] V THE TRANSITION IN MINOR BUILDINGS AND INTERIORS There are numberless buildings in all parts of the country which show in their external treatment how gradual was the supersession of the old style by the new and more correct treatment, and how limited in range was the influence of even so eminent an architect as Inigo Jones. Indeed, throughout the seventeenth century it would appear that architectural design followed two paths; one was that trodden by trained architects who aimed at correctitude; the other was that taken by less learned designers, whether architects or (as of old) masons and artificers, who had not mastered the niceties of classic design, and therefore mixed ancient methods with such of the new as they could compass. The mullioned window was one of the old features to which they long held fast. The new idea of large window openings such as prevailed in the Banqueting House they seem to have disliked. Their reluctance had, no doubt, a constructional basis, for the narrow lights of a mullioned window are easily bridged, whereas a wide opening requires either a deeper head to carry the weight above it, or else an arch. The introduction of an arch or a deep head involved a more serious departure from ancient ways, and a more complete committal to new design than the ordinary man could face. He did not mind pilasters, and he did not mind a heavy cornice, and consequently there are plenty of instances in which the old mullioned windows are accompanied by the more stiff and straight arrangement which a heavy cornice involves. Such an instance is to be seen in the free school at Warminster, founded as late as 1707 (Fig. 57). Another feature to which designers clung was the gable. This, of course, had been from time immemorial a dominant feature of English houses; it was the simplest and most natural way of closing the end of a roof, and as roofs were nearly always of a steep pitch, so, too, were the gables. But there was no place in classic architecture for steep gables, nor indeed for gables of any kind; the nearest approach to them was the pediment. It was only by a determined effort that the English architect could get rid of gables, and this effort was too much for any but the most resolute to make. Gables survived even longer than mullioned windows, and as our climate, with its rain and snow, is better encountered by steep roofs than by flat, the roofs continued to be steep.