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Knole, Longleat, Burleigh and Hatfield, Hardwick and Audley End, are familiar instances of a social as well as an architectural change which covered England with buildings where the thought of defence was abandoned for that of domestic comfort and refinement.
Anyhow the contrast between the state of the now miscalled "stony field," well stocked with worms, and the present state of the ground beneath the old beech-trees in Knole Park, where worms appeared to be absent, was striking. A narrow path running across part of my lawn was paved in 1843 with small flagstones, set edgeways; but worms threw up many castings and weeds grew thickly between them.
Knole House stands in a large park, which has the finest beeches in England, and it is really more of a show-place than a family residence. The Sackville-Wests are among the richest of the nobility and have other homes which are probably more comfortable than this impressive but unhomelike palace.
Carved and upholstered Chair. Hardwick Hall. Chair upholstered in Spitalfields silk. Knole, Sevenoaks. There is still preserved in a lumber room one of the old benches of seventeenth century work now replaced in the hall by modern folding chairs. This is of oak, with turned skittle-shaped legs slanting outwards, and connected and strengthened by plain stretchers.
Something similar to Knole House is Penshurst Place, about ten miles away, but with an atmosphere and traditions quite different from the Sackville-West mansion. This great palace, just adjacent to the village of Penshurst, was built in the Thirteenth Century, passing shortly after into the hands of the Sidney family, with whom it has remained ever since.
His pictures are to be found freely, as I have written, in old English mansions, such as Arundel and Alnwick Castles, Knowsley, Knole, Petworth, etc. A head said to be by Van Dyck is in the National Gallery. Van Dyck had few pupils: one, an Englishman named Dobson, earned an honourable reputation as a painter.
Kirke and Anthony had spent a long morning together discussing the route, and it had been decided that it would be best to keep along the high ridge due west until they were a little beyond Kemsing, which they would be able to see below them in the valley; and then to strike across between that village and Otford, and keeping almost due south ride up through Knole Park; then straight down on the other side into the Weald, and so past Tonbridge home.
Oak furniture made in England during the seventeenth century, is still a credit to the painstaking craftsmen of those days, and even upholstered furniture, like the couches and chairs at Knole, after more than 250 years' service, are fit for use.
It seems from the Knole furniture, and a comparison of the designs with those of some of the tables and other woodwork produced during the same reign, bearing the impress of the more severe style of Inigo Jones, that there were then in England two styles of decorative furniture.
Few appear to have survived, but there are still to be seen in pictures of the period a chair represented as covered with crimson velvet, studded with brass nails, the seat trimmed with fringe, similar to that at Knole, illustrated on p. 100.
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