• A VISIT TO KNOWLE PARK.
What is, to the majority of persons, the attraction of a " show-house "— one of those aristocratic mansions, a station for royal progresses of the old times, where there is a state bedroom in which Queen Elizabeth is sure to have slept, stiff and solemn with brocade, lustreless now, but still aw- ful to the lord-loving British soul, or whose curtains are yet redolent of some bon mot of Charles the Second? What is it marshals in procession the dozen or score of persons who follow in the wake of the exhibiting domestic, listening to that oft-repeated tale of Titiaus, and Vandycks, and Sir Peter Lelys, Reynoldses, and Lawrences, and still-recurring Rey- noldses, arras, and jewelled caskets and quaintly carved mirrors, and ponderous antique chairs? What fills the visitors' book with whole clouds of recorded Smiths and Joneses amid which peep out here and there stars of the social or intellectual sides ?
Some such considerations as these occurred to us the other day, as, quitting Knowle House—a phoenix of show-houses--we stepped out into the park which girds it round in a circumference of five or six miles, and, leaving Sevenoaks to the North-west, strolled leisurely on. Down smooth glades, their green broken by herds of deer, along grassy uplands and meadow-slopes, through endless groups of beech, diversified here and there by pine, oak, elm, or the tender birch, and past the three hawthorns known as the landmark of an artist-friend, whose background of last year grew to being in a leaf-choked dell of Knowle Park, gorgeous with the hues of autumn. The uncertain weather, which had broken in a slight thunder-storm while we were in the house, had spangled the grass with a copious rain which was now beginning to dry.
For our own part, we could not only have given reasons for visiting Knowle, but could congratulate ourselves on the satisfactory manner in which our expectations had been justified. That fine antique in the hall, here named Demosthenes, known elsewhere by different titles, might even have sufficed by itself. There is something rugged in the face, mingled with a deep sadness,—as of one whose life is a steady and unremitting conflict, a struggle against mountainous greed and selfishness and mean- ness, and who will fight it out for the right's sake. What though there be in the same room a Canova's Theseus of the Apollo kind ? We can afford not to see it.
From the antique classic to the modern medimval—from sculpture to painting—we proceed up-stairs to long walls of portraiture and art. And here assuredly there is enough to satisfy most tastes for the illustrious— especially in literature. The early portrait of Chaucer, downward-eyed in pleasant thought; for Shakspere, a duplicate of the Chandos portrait; Milton, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Dryden Pope' Sir Kenelm
' Digby, Hobbes of Malmesbury, Locke Johnson, and a host of others ; of heroes, one above all, Cromwell in his earlier manhood,—" to me," says Carlyle, "royal enough " ; and, of another kind of hero, a curious old German Reformation group, Luther, Melancthon, and others—uninspired imitations, however, of the earth, earthy, (and Luther, by the by, in his massive fleshiness, not much unlike that Luther of Willis's Rooms, Gavazzi) ; royal and noble dames and damsels; kings, princes, dukes, German and Italian; with likenesses ad libitum of the Sackville and other families who preceded the present proprietor, Lord Amherst, in the ownership of Knowle. Here too may one learn, if one has not
already learned, to reverence with veritable art-worship that marvellous "grinder of flesh and blood" Hans Holbein. 'What life and character ! What vivid directness of work ! What perception of the meaning of a face, and honourable truth-telling ! Surely, too, the sitters were of a less puling race than those who in our days lay themselves out for victim- ization by a Mr. Collins ; or Holbein would not have obtained a sitting from Francis the First, such as we see him here.
Of tapestry with the history of Nebuchadnezzar, and the sleeping- chamber honoured by the repose of James the First, (or was it some sove- reign person a trifle less uninteresting?) let others tell. But we will hint a word of warning to the would-be orthodox in art, not to try to admire the painted copies of Raphael's cartoons, for they will not and ought not to succeed. It will be quite enough if they say they do, in order to avoid loss of caste.
To return to our opening query as to the positive pleasure derived from going over Knowle House or other mansion of similar character. What wotteth the ordinary Cockney or other excursionist of its old archiepisco- pal tenure by the see of Canterbury, of the enclosing of the park by Thomas Bourchier, or of its passing successively to the Crown, to Somer- set, to Dudley, to Pole, to Leicester, and to Buckhtust ? Does Brown care for the various styles of architecture of which the building affords examples, or for the embattled gateway ? We fear that he prefers the cheap stucco front, compo, and the ornamentation of the " tumbledown order." Has Robinson any delight in Holbein ? or does the bosom of Tompkins glow with sympathetic heat as he contemplates the features of Chaucer? does he trace through the lineaments of Beaumont and Fletcher the men, the thoughts of Beaumont and Fletcher the poets ? And, on the whole, is it not rather oppressive to walk through those antique wa- homelike chambers, to shale along the polished oak floors with the alter- native of slipping, and to sit under the ministry of the explanatory do- mestic--not always so profitable as that of the somewhat dignified dame at Knowle ? All things considered, is not the visit a bore to half the visitors ?
It is,—and yet not altogether so. For he who is least nice of appre- hension is conscious of a pleasurable sensation that might find articulate voice as follows. "Firstly, I am seeing a sight. Secondly, I am in the house of a lord (or other social magnate, as the case may be). Thirdly, the furniture, though clumsy and inelegant, is worth a vast deal of money. Fourthly, (in some instances) the Queen and Prince Albert were here, and her Majesty sat on that chair." But the halo surrounding this circum- stance does not shine retrospectively beyond the (ere. of George the Fourth. Lastly, it may be said that scarcely any one, though possibly himself quite unaware of the fact, fails to feel, in the presence of antiquity, a certain influence which he would not willingly have missed.
Should any one, reading of the visit we paid to Knowle, go and do like- wise, we would advise him to follow our example in another particular, and see the old moated house at Ightham, not far distant, named Ightham Moat ; almost the only house of the kind, we believe, of ordinary size, re- maining in England, and in parts of as old a date as the thirteenth century.
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