house and garden: and mighty merry we were. The house indeed do appear
very fine, but not so fine as it hath heretofore to me; particularly the
ceilings are not so good as I always took them to be, being nothing so
well wrought as my Lord Chancellor's are; and though the figure of the
house without be very extraordinary good, yet the stayre-case is exceeding
poor; and a great many pictures, and not one good one in the house but one
of Harry the Eighth, done by Holben; and not one good suit of hangings in
all the house, but all most ancient things, such as I would not give the
hanging-up of in my house; and the other furniture, beds and other things,
accordingly.

[Mr. George T. Robinson, F.S.A., in a paper on "Decorative Plaster
Work," read before the Society of Arts in April, 1891, refers to the
ceilings at Audley End as presenting an excellent idea of the state
of the stuccoer's art in the middle of James I.'s reign, and adds,
"Few houses in England can show so fine a series of the same date
. . . The great hall has medallions in the square portions of the
ceiling formed by its dividing timber beams. The large saloon on
the principal floor-a room about 66 feet long by 30 feet wide-has a
very remarkable ceiling of the pendentive type, which presents many
peculiarities, the most notable of which, that these not only depend
from the ceiling, but the outside ones spring from the walls in a
natural and structural manner. This is a most unusual circumstance
in the stucco work of the time, the reason for the omission of this
reasonable treatment evidently being the unwillingness of the
stuccoer to omit his elaborate frieze in which he took such delight"
("Journal Soc. of Arts," vol. xxxix., p. 449)]

Only the gallery is good, and, above all things, the cellars, where we
went down and drank of much good liquor; and indeed the cellars are fine: