Hampton Court ... Illustrated with forty-three drawings by Herbert ...

GREAT GALLERIES 21
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 eightyone
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 staterooms,
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 endof 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.