Each inhabited portion of the Castle, too, was of a style violently and even deliberately discordant with the severe and uninhabitable splendours of the Drum Tower and the old Keep. These contained huge, gloomy rooms, with infinitesimal windows, that looked out, for the most part, on sunless little courtyards, mere wells of darkness, made by the addition of new buildings to the old. Here, in these big, stark halls, were mouldering arrangements of armour, or acres of dingy pictures, bloated Flemish boors, dubious angular Madonnas, riotous female nudities, all hidden from the world by a merciful veil of dirt. The stone floors were inadequately disguised with worn matting, and at night one feeble, smoky lamp was allotted for the illumination of each apartment. A proud neglect, an almost arrogant ostentation of poverty and discomfort, reigned supreme. The inhabited wings of the Castle were different in effect, though similar in scheme. Rows of bare barrack-like rooms lined the corridors--hung with glaring chintzes, and furnished with chairs of rep and horsehair. Their ornaments were meagre as their blankets, and their large windows threw a merciless glare of daylight on their serviceable sterling ugliness. Each had a square of carpet from which the pattern had long been trodden out and through in patches; each had cupboards and washstand of light grained wood; each was coldly spacious, airy, cheerless, and inhospitable. Most loud of all the discords that many generations of bad architects had contributed to the original of Queen Isabel’s castle was the high white wing where the old Duke lay dying. An Early Victorian Duchess had made this addition; it was big and bald and bare, faced with white stucco and adorned with modern-Gothic pinnacles. It grew out like a monstrous polyp from the side of a gracious little Jacobean pavilion, and dominated the main entrance with its stalwart blatancy. To crown all, the same Duchess had built on to the great Drum Tower a _porte-cochère_ on the model of the Erechtheion, and had holystoned the Drum Tower itself of a pale and repellent buttermilk blue.