But our purpose lies deeper than that which inspires a water-colour sketch.  We must learn when and why that house was built; we must see how the facts reconcile its somewhat tawdry, its somewhat suburban aspect, with the richer and more romantic aspects of the park.  The park is even now, though it be the middle of autumn, full of blowing green, and the brown circling woods, full of England and English home life.  That single tree in the foreground is a lime; what a splendour of leafage it will be in the summer!  Those four on the right are chestnuts, and those far away, lying between us and the imperial downs, are elms; through that vista you can see the grand line, the abrupt hollows, and the bit of chalk road cut zig-zag out of the steep side.  Then why the anomaly of Italian urns and pilasters; why not red Elizabethan gables and diamond casements?

Why not?  Because at the beginning of the century, when Brighton was being built, fragments of architectural gossip were flying about Sussex, and one of these had found its way to, and had rested in, the heart of the grandfather of the present owner:  in a simple and bucolic way he had been seized by a desire for taste and style, and the present building was the result.  Therefore it will be well to examine in detail the house which young John Norton of ’86 was so fond of declaring he could never see without becoming instantly conscious of a sense of dislike, a hatred that he was fond of describing as a sort of constitutional complaint which he was never quite free from, and which any view of the Rockery, or the pilasters of the French bow-window, or indeed of anything pertaining to Thornby Place, called at once into an active existence.

Thornby Place is but two stories high, and its spruce walls of Portland stone and ashlar work rise sheer out of the green sward; in front, Doric columns support a heavy entablature, and there are urns at the corners of the building.  The six windows on the ground floor are topped with round arches, and coming up the drive the house seems a perfect square.  But this regularity of structure has on the east side been somewhat interfered with by a projection of some thirty or forty feet—­a billiard room, in fine, which during John’s minority Mrs Norton had thought proper to add.  But she had lived to rue her experiment, for to this young man, with his fretful craving for beauty and exactness of proportion, it is an ever present source of complaint; and he had once in a half humorous, half serious way, gone so far as to avail himself of the “eyesore,” as he called it, to excuse his constant absence from home, and as a pretence for shutting himself up in his dear college, with his cherished Latin authors.  It was partly for the sake of avenging himself on his mother, whose decisive practicality jarred the delicate music of a nature extravagantly ideal, that he so severely criticised all that she held sacred; and his strictures fell heaviest on the bow window, looking somewhat