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The gallery leading to these rooms is called the Brown Gallery. It is well named—oak floor, oak walls, and barrelled ceiling, criss-crossed with oak slats in a pattern something like cat’s cradle. Some of the best pieces of the English furniture are ranged down each side of this gallery: portentously important chairs, Jacobean cross-legged or later love-seats in their original coverings, whether of plum and silver, or red brocade with heavy fringes, or green with silver fringes, or yellow silk sprigged in black, or powder-blue; and all have their attendant stool squatting beside them. They are lovely, silent rows, for ever holding out their arms, and for ever disappointed. At the end of this gallery is a tiny oratory, down two steps, for the use of the devout: this little, almost secret, place glows with colour like a jewel, but nobody ever notices it, and on the whole it probably prefers to hide itself away unobserved.

There is also the Leicester Gallery, which preserves in its name the sole trace of Lord Leicester’s brief ownership of Knole. The Leicester Gallery is very dark and mysterious, furnished with red velvet Cromwellian farthingale chairs and sofas, dark as wine; there are illuminated scrolls of two family pedigrees—Sackville and Curzon—richly emblazoned with coats of arms, drawn out in 1589 and 1623 respectively; and in the end window there is a small stained-glass portrait of “Herbrand de Sackville, a Norman notable, came into England with William the Conqueror, A.D. 1066.” (Herbrandus de Sackville, Praepotens Normanus, intravit Angliam cum Gulielmo Conquestore, Anno Domini MLXVI.) There is also a curious portrait hanging on one of the doors, of Catherine Fitzgerald Countess of Desmond, the portrait of a very old lady, in a black dress and a white ruff, with that strange far-away look in her dead blue eyes that comes with extreme age. For tradition says of her that she was born in the reign of Edward the Fourth and died in the reign of Charles the First, breaking her leg incidentally at the age of ninety by falling off a cherry tree; that is to say, she was a child when the princes were smothered in the Tower, a girl when Henry the Seventh came to the throne, and watched the pageant of all the Tudors and the accession of the Stuarts—the whole of English history enclosed between the Wars of the Roses and the Civil War. She must have been a truly legendary figure in the country by the time she had reached the age of a hundred and forty or thereabouts.