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 of the "Beauties of 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."
