This work offers an insight into the tastes and manners of an age which produced some of England's finest architecture. The five earls featured flourished in the 18th century, when the fashionable amateur exercised a greater influence than ever before in the long history of British art. The five - Burlington, Pembroke, Leicester, Oxford, and Bathurst - were deep-dyed aesthetes and creators of superb domains. The principal country houses which they designed - Chiswick house, Holkham Hall, Wimpole Hall, York Assembly Rooms, Wilton House, Marble Hill, and Cirencester Park - are almost all standing today and the landscape gardens which they laid out still amount to some of England's greatest treasure.