Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/187

Rh else Elizabethan. Everything was ornamented, nothing was plain. Outside and inside there was carving, painting, sculpture, and needlework. Turrets, gables, and domes were decorated, brick chimneys were elaborately carved, towers were surmounted with carved figures, roofs were castellated, and oriel windows ridiculously exaggerated. From the narrow and draughty Gothic loophole of the past the sixteenth-century architect turned to an almost painful extreme of glaring light. We hear of a window with 3,200 panes of glass in it, and remember Lord Bacon's warning, "You shall have sometimes fair houses so full of glass that one cannot tell where to be out of the sun or cold." From these windows the wealthy English owner could look out on to his newly laid out garden, with its stately terrace, its broad flights of steps, its vases and fountains, mazes and grass plots, its yew hedges in grotesque shapes. The primitive medieval garden, which had developed into the pleasure garden of the early Tudors, had now grown into the formal old English garden of the Elizabethan era. The architect who designed the house, as a matter of course in those days, designed the garden also. In front lay the wide terrace, from