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