fought bravely for the King in the Civil War.  Their house was captured by the enemy, and besieged by James Compton, Earl of Northampton, and the story of the fighting about the house abounds in interest, but cannot be related here.  The building was much battered by the siege and by Cromwell’s soldiers, who plundered the house, killed the deer in the park, defaced the monuments in the church, and wrought much mischief.  Since the eighteenth-century disaster to the family it has been restored, and remains to this day one of the most charming homes in England.

[35] The present Marquis of Northampton in his book contends that the house was mainly built in the reign of Henry VII by Edmund Compton, Sir William’s father, and that Sir William only enlarged and added to the house.  We have not space to record the arguments in favour of or against this view.

  [36] The Progresses of James I, by Nichols.

[Illustration:  Window-catch, Brockhall, Northants]

“The greatest advantages men have by riches are to give, to build, to plant, and make pleasant scenes.”  So wrote Sir William Temple, diplomatist, philosopher, and true garden-lover.  And many of the gentlemen of England seem to have been of the same mind, if we may judge from the number of delightful old country-houses set amid pleasant scenes that time and war and fire have spared to us.  Macaulay draws a very unflattering picture of the old country squire, as of the parson.  His untruths concerning the latter I have endeavoured to expose in another place.[37] The manor-houses themselves declare the historian’s strictures to be unfounded.  Is it possible that men so ignorant and crude could have built for themselves residences bearing evidence of such good taste, so full of grace and charm, and surrounded by such rare blendings of art and nature as are displayed so often in park and garden?  And it is not, as a rule, in the greatest mansions, the vast piles erected by the great nobles of the Court, that we find such artistic qualities, but most often in the smaller manor-houses of knights and squires.  Certainly many higher-cultured people of Macaulay’s time and our own could learn a great deal from them of the art of making beautiful homes.

  [37] Old-time Parson, by P.H.  Ditchfield, 1908.

[Illustration:  Gothic Chimney, Norton St. Philip, Somerset]

Holinshed, the Chronicler, writing during the third quarter of the sixteenth century, makes some illuminating observations on the increasing preference shown in his time for stone and brick buildings in place of timber and plaster.  He wrote:—­