The house is in the old English domestic manner of Mr. Blore; simple, grand, and with an elevated terrace on three sides. The interior contains apartments, large, lofty, and well-arranged, opening into a spacious hall. There is none of that confused appearance sometimes found in modern Gothic houses, which are often crowded with turrets, bell-towers, and chimney-tops, without; and traversed by narrow passages, and over-done with Gothic cornices and other Gothic ornaments; within. Mr. Blore has the happy art of giving a certain elegance of proportion to the different parts of his buildings, in consequence of which there are plain spaces, giving by contrast its full effect to every moulding and ornament. Take, for example, a stack of chimneys. When the mouldings at the base, and on the top or capital, are brought too close together by the shortness of the intermediate shaft, the effect is crowded, lumpish, and, in every point of view, the reverse of elegant: but lengthen the shaft to a certain extent, determinable by the feeling dictated by an artistic eye, and elegance is at once produced; for elegance is the effect of proportions more slender than what are usual, executed in a material which conveys the idea of as much strength as is contained in a much larger mass, or, at all events, of amply sufficient strength.
