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

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HAMPTON COURT
age of palace-building passed away. The two great
English architects,Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren,
tried their hands at two palaces — the new Whitehall
and the new Hampton Court, but neither was completed,
and the day went by.
IX
From Wren's day to our own, conflicting opinions
have been held of his alterations at Hampton Court.
A reaction soon set in against his work, led by Horace
Walpole, who lost no opportunity of sneering at the
style, while he excused the architect. His own eccentric
ideas of Gothic forced him to condemn work
which he understood even less than the medieval
methods which he affected to adore. He speaks of
Wren's work in a tone of lordly superiority, as an
imitation of the " pompous edifices of the French
monarch." The author ofthe "Beautiesof England
and Wales" in 1816 gives a still more severe judgment.
He compares Wren's work with Wolsey's,
and adds, " So long as those impressive vestiges
exist, assuredly it will be lamented that a British
monarch did not preserve a consistency of English
style in the most extensive palace appertaining to
his crown, or did not, on another site, raise an edifice
equally sumptuous in style, purely and uniformly
classical."