Sir William Chambers, the last of the Inigo Jones and Wren succession, speaks especially of the circular court described above. There are few nobler thoughts, he observes, in the remains of antiquity. The effect of the building, properly carried out, would have been surprising and great in the highest degree. The diameter of the court was to be 210 feet, the ground floor being an open arcade or cloister. Jones wholly misapprehended the depth of the King’s purse when he made a design of so costly a character. Otherwise, we must conclude that he made these beautiful drawings for his own pleasure—a kind of vision which he knew could never be realised. That this is not a correct statement of the case seems to be proved by what followed. Let us take the Banqueting House as a unit. It cost, roughly speaking, 20,000_l._, of which sum 15,000_l._ was for the mere building. Three similar buildings in the same court would have cost at least 60,000_l._, the chapel more than the rest. This foots up at once to 80,000_l._ The Persian Court could not have cost less than 50,000_l._ Add to this the two magnificent halls, and we have 80,000_l._ more. Yet we have only accounted for two of the seven courts, and have said nothing of the four fronts. We feel tempted to think that Inigo, like the person mentioned by Tennyson, built his soul “a lordly pleasure-house, wherein at ease for aye to dwell,” and that he neither intended nor expected that King James should carry it out. That this is not the case we can judge by the design he made for Charles I. in 1639. It was to be of only half the dimensions, and was to be studiously plain. Whereas the Banqueting House was one of the plainest and least costly features of the 1619 design, it would appear in the new view as one of the most elaborately ornamented. But he misjudged the purse of the son, as he had misjudged that of the father. Not a stone was ever laid, and when, a few years later, the war broke out, it was hopeless to think that Charles, though sorely in need of a commodious and really royal residence, could ever build, even after the new and modified design presented to him by his Surveyor. [Illustration: _Part of the First Design by_ INIGO JONES _for the Rebuilding of Whitehall_, 1619. _From_ KENT’S “_Inigo Jones_.”] [Illustration: _Part of the Second Design by_ INIGO JONES _for the Rebuilding of Whitehall_, 1639. _From_ CAMPBELL’S “_Vitruvius Britannicus_.”]