te dining-room, the
great ballroom, with clear-story windows, and as many more rooms as the
size of the apartment will admit. In the great palaces, the picture
gallery takes a whole wing and sometimes two, the library being
generally situated on a higher story.

The patriarchal system required that all the married sons, with their
wives and children and servants, should be lodged in the same building
with their parents. The eldest invariably lived on the second floor, the
second son on the third, which is the highest, though there is generally
a low rambling attic, occupied by servants, and sometimes by the
chaplain, the librarian and the steward, in better rooms. When there
were more than two married sons, which hardly ever happened under the
old system of primogeniture, they divided the apartments between them as
best they could. The unmarried younger children had to put up with what
was left. Moreover, in the greatest houses, where there was usually a
cardinal of the name, one wing of the first floor was entirely given up
to him; and instead of the canopy in the antechamber, flanked by the
hereditary coloured umbrellas carried on state occasions by two lackeys
behind the family coach, the prince of the Church was entitled to a
throne room, as all cardinals are. The eldest son's apartment was
generally more or less a repetition of the state one below, but the
rooms were lower, the decorations less elaborate, though seldom less
stiff in character, and a large part of the available space was given up
to the children.

It is clear from all this that even in modern times a large family might
take up a great deal of room. Looking back across two or three
centuries, therefore, to the days when every princely household was a
court, and was called a court, it is easier to understand the existence
of such phenomenally vast mansions as the Doria palace, or those of the
Borghese, the Altieri, the Barberini and others, who lived in almost
royal state, and lodged hundreds upon hundreds of retainers in their
homes.

And not only did all the members of the family live under one roof, as a
few of them still live, but the custom of dining together at one huge
table was universal. A daily dinner of twenty persons--grandparents,
parents and children, down to the youngest that is old enough to sit up
to its plate in a high chair, would be a serious matter to most European
households. But in Rome it was looked upon as a matter of cours