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The galleries are perhaps the most characteristic rooms in such a house.

THE STONE COURT: BOURCHIER’S GATEHOUSE

Long and narrow, with dark shining floors, armorial glass in the windows, rich plaster-work ceilings, and portraits on the walls, they are splendidly sombre and sumptuous. The colour of the Cartoon Gallery, when I have come into it in the evening, with the sunset flaming through the west window, has often taken my breath away. I have stood, stock still and astonished, in the doorway. The gallery is ninety feet in length, the floor formed of black oak planks irregularly laid, the charm of which is that they are not planks at all, but solid tree-trunks, split in half, with the rounded half downwards; and on this oak flooring lie the blue and scarlet patches from the stained west window, more subduedly echoed in the velvets of the chair coverings, the coloured marbles of the great Renaissance fireplace, and the fruits and garlands of the carved woodwork surrounding the windows. There is nothing garish: all the colours have melted into an old harmony that is one of the principal beauties of these rooms. The walls here in the Cartoon Gallery are hung with rose-red Genoa velvet, so lovely that I almost regret Mytens’ copies of the Raphael cartoons hiding most of it; but if, at Knole, one were too nicely reluctant to sacrifice the walls, whether panelled or velvet-hung, then all the pictures would have to be stacked on the floor of the attics. The same regret applies to the ball-room, where the Elizabethan panelling—oak, but originally painted white, turned by age to ivory—is so covered up as to be unnoticeable behind the Sackville portraits of ten generations. Fortunately, the frieze in the ball-room cannot be hidden. It used to delight me as a child, with its carved intricacies of mermaids and dolphins, mermen and mermaids with scaly, twisting tails and salient anatomy, and I was invariably contemptuous of those visitors to whom I pointed out the frieze but who were more interested in the pictures. It always fell to my lot to “show the house” to visitors when I was living there alone with my grandfather, for he shared the family failing of unsociability, and whenever a telegram arrived threatening invasion he used to take the next train to London for the day, returning in the evening when the coast was clear. It mattered nothing that I was every whit as bored by the invasion as he could have been; in a divergence between the wishes of eighty and the wishes of eight, the wishes of eight went to the wall.