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The other side is the garden side—the gay, princely side, with flowers in the foreground; the grey walls rising straight up from the green turf; the mullioned windows, and the Tudor gables with the heraldic leopards sitting stiffly at each corner. The park side is the side for winter; the garden side the side for summer. It has an indescribable gaiety and courtliness. The grey of the Kentish rag is almost pearly in the sun, the occasional coral festoon of a climbing rose dashed against it; the long brown-red roofs are broken by the chimney-stacks with their slim, peaceful threads of blue smoke mounting steadily upwards. One looks down upon the house from a certain corner in the garden. Here is a bench among a group of yews—dark, red-berried yews; and the house lies below one in the hollow, lovely in its colour and its serenity. It has all the quality of peace and permanence; of mellow age; of stateliness and tradition. It is gentle and venerable. Yet it is, as I have said, gay. It has the deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go, smiled wisely over their sorrows and their joys, and learnt an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour. It is, above all, an English house. It has the tone of England; it melts into the green of the garden turf, into the tawnier green of the park beyond, into the blue of the pale English sky; it settles down into its hollow amongst the cushioned tops of the trees; the brown-red of those roofs is the brown-red of the roofs of humble farms and pointed oast-houses, such as stain over a wide landscape of England the quilt-like pattern of the fields. I make bold to say that it stoops to nothing either pretentious or meretricious. There is here no flourish of architecture, no ornament but the leopards, rigid and vigilant. The stranger may even think, upon arrival, that the front of the house is disappointing. It is, indeed, extremely modest. There is a gate-house flanked by two square grey towers, placed between two wings which provide only a monotony of windows and gables. It is true that two or three fine sycamores, symmetrical and circular as open umbrellas, redeem the severity of the front, and that a herd of fallow deer, browsing in the dappled shade of the trees, maintains the tradition of an English park. But, for the rest, the front of the house is so severe as to be positively uninteresting; it is quiet and monkish; “a beautiful decent simplicity,” said Horace Walpole, “which charms one.” There is here to be found none of the splendour of Elizabethan building. A different impression, however, is in store when once the wicket-gate has been opened. You are in a courtyard of a size the frontage had never led you to expect, and the vista through a second gateway shows you the columns of a second court; your eye is caught by an oriel window opposite, and by other windows with heraldic bearings in their panes, promise of rooms and galleries; by gables and the heraldic leopards; by the clock tower which gives an oddly Chinese effect immediately above the Tudor oriel. Up till a few years ago Virginia creeper blazed scarlet in autumn on the walls of the Green Court, but it has now been torn away, and what may be lost in colour is compensated by the gain in seeing the grey stone and the slight moulding which runs, following the shape of the towers, across the house.

NORTH-EAST VIEW OF KNOLE

From the drawing by T. Bridgeman

On the whole, the quadrangle is reminiscent of Oxford, though more palatial and less studious. The house is built round a system of these courtyards: first this one, the Green Court, which is the largest and most magnificent; then the second one, or Stone Court, which is not turfed, like the Green Court, but wholly paved, and which has along one side of it a Jacobean colonnade; the third court is the Water Court, and has none of the display of the first two: it is smaller, and quite demure, indeed rather like some old house in Nuremberg, with the latticed window of one of the galleries running the whole length of it, and the friendly unconcern of an immense bay-tree growing against one of its walls. There are four other courts, making seven in all. This number is supposed to correspond to the days in the week; and in pursuance of this conceit there are in the house fifty-two staircases, corresponding to the weeks in the year, and three hundred and sixty-five rooms, corresponding to the days. I cannot truthfully pretend that I have ever verified these counts, and it may be that their accuracy is accepted solely on the strength of the legend; but, if this is so, then it has been a very persistent legend, and I prefer to sympathise with the amusement of the ultimate architect on making the discovery that by a judicious juggling with his additions he could bring courts, stairs, and rooms up to that satisfactory total.

A stone lobby under the oriel window divides the Green Court from the Stone Court. In summer the great oak doors of this second gate-house are left open, and it has sometimes happened that I have found a stag in the banqueting hall, puzzled but still dignified, strayed in from the park since no barrier checked him.

It becomes impossible, after passing through the formality of the two first quadrangles, to follow the ramblings of the house geographically. They are so involved that, after a lifetime of familiarity, I still catch myself pausing to think out the shortest route from one room to another. Four acres of building is no mean matter.