These last were very difficult questions to answer . For Harthover had been built at ninety different times , and in nineteen different styles , and looked as if somebody had built a whole street of houses of every imaginable shape , and then stirred them together with a spoon . For the attics were Anglo-Saxon . The third door Norman . The second Cinque-cento . The first-floor Elizabethan . The right wing Pure Doric . The centre Early English , with a huge portico copied from the Parthenon . The left wing pure Boeotian , which the country folk admired most of all , became it was just like the new barracks in the town , only three times as big . The grand staircase was copied from the Catacombs at Rome . The back staircase from the Tajmahal at Agra . This was built by Sir John 's great-great-great-uncle , who won , in Lord Clive 's Indian Wars , plenty of money , plenty of wounds , and no more taste than his betters . The cellars were copied from the caves of Elephanta . The offices from the Pavilion at Brighton . And the rest from nothing in heaven , or earth , or under the earth . So that Harthover House was a great puzzle to antiquarians , and a thorough Naboth 's vineyard to critics , and architects , and all persons who like meddling with other men 's business , and spending other men 's money . So they were all setting upon poor Sir John , year after year , and trying to talk him into spending a hundred thousand pounds or so , in building , to please them and not himself . But he always put them off , like a canny North-countryman as he was . One wanted him to build a Gothic house , but he said he was no Goth ; and another to build an Elizabethan , but he said he lived under good Queen Victoria , and not good Queen Bess ; and another was bold enough to tell him that his house was ugly , but he said he lived inside it , and not outside ; and another , that there was no unity in it , but he said that that was just why he liked the old place . For he liked to see how each Sir John , and Sir Hugh , and Sir Ralph , and Sir Randal , had left his mark upon the place , each after his own taste ; and he had no more notion of disturbing his ancestors ' work than of disturbing their graves .
XXXXX now the house looked like a real live house , that had a history , and had grown and grown as the world grew ; and that it was only an upstart fellow who did not know who his own grandfather was , who would change it for some spick and span new Gothic or Elizabethan thing , which looked as if it bad been all spawned in a night , as mushrooms are .
For after at by from in like of than with