Of building

I can shew you a man’s character in his house”, said Roger North. “If he hath bin given to parsimony or profusion, to judge rightly or superficially, to deal in great matters or small, high or low, his edifices shall be tincted accordingly, and the justness or imperfections of his mind will appear in them.” ¹ Quite so. But what a man wanted of his house, by the time Roger North “cast anchor in Norfolk” in 1691, was not the same as it had been just 50 years earlier, even if few could shed the past absolutely “Really there is scarce an old house”, North observes in Of building (1698), “but alter it as you will, shall leave some staine of obsolete antiquity upon the model, either by low floors, beams appearing, or walls patch’t”; accordingly, “all new is best”. Yet North himself, in his rebuilding of Rougham Hall, had begun with no tabula rasa. After almost a decade of works at Rougham, which he thought at one time he might never finish, North addressed his Cursory notes of building to like-minded addicts, explaining his particular circumstances as “the Repair, or rather Metamorfosis, of an old house in The Country”. Others, in North’s direct experience, had contrived no less remarkable transformations. And it was probably of his Suffolk neighbour, Henry Lord Arlington – “given to no expensive vice but building” ² – that North was thinking when he concluded: “the greatest statesmen, and favorites of fortune, after proof of all the envyed grandure upon earth, have chosen, either upon disgrace or voluntary retiredment, to imploy their time in designing fabricks and executing them. I shall add, that designing and executing is not onely a lawfull, but a very great pleasure … more lofty and aspiring than any other injoyment upon earth, and savours of creation, the knowne act of an almighty power … he that hath no relish of the grandure and joy of building, is a stupid ox”. ³ 10 A near-contemporary view (attributed to John Wyck) of the demolished Euston Hall (Suffolk), as rebuilt and hugely extended by Henry Lord Arlington (d. 1685), with his still-surviving parish church in the foreground. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315072388/a7b09f95-0aaa-4823-88e8-251d521f6cce/content/fig10_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>