Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/65

Rh eminently suitable completion to a scheme of decoration which includes ceiling as well as walls. The idea was not unhappy, but the execution was too often inferior.

The great galleries—the Queen's, which is eighty-one feet long by twenty-five broad, and the King's, which is a hundred and seventeen feet long and twenty-four wide, and was built for the Raffaelle cartoons, and the communication gallery, connecting the King's and Queen's apartments,—are magnificent rooms, which break the monotony of the smaller suites with their decorations all very similar to each other. It is to be observed, further, that the state-rooms, now hung with pictures and tapestry, and open to the public, by no means exhaust the building. There are numerous small rooms and staircases which are not open, but which, when all the rooms were used by the courts, must have agreeably varied what would otherwise be a somewhat stiff series of too uniformly dignified apartments. It was not necessary then to pass from room to room, as the visitor passes now, to get from one end of the court to another. Passages of communication are frequent; and the reproach which is sometimes directed against Wren's building of a sacrifice of comfort to dignity is undeserved.