. The imperial island; England's chronicle in stone;. cturesque, but lighter and richer, is the Drawing-room, finished with wainscot full of square panels and a broad,elaborately carved chimney-piece, all of dark oak, reaching toa flat ceiling covered with an intricate design in stucco nearlywhite, and divided into large square panels by great beam-likeprojections. While the windows of the house are mullioned inthe old English style, most of the interior decoration is Renais-sance, showing the earlier English treatment. In nearly allthe rooms the antique character has been preserved, and mod-e
. The imperial island; England's chronicle in stone;. cturesque, but lighter and richer, is the Drawing-room, finished with wainscot full of square panels and a broad,elaborately carved chimney-piece, all of dark oak, reaching toa flat ceiling covered with an intricate design in stucco nearlywhite, and divided into large square panels by great beam-likeprojections. While the windows of the house are mullioned inthe old English style, most of the interior decoration is Renais-sance, showing the earlier English treatment. In nearly allthe rooms the antique character has been preserved, and mod-ern refinement has made them exquisite. A parlor containingfurniture in the style of Louis XV. and a more private roomhave recent papering of the so-called sesthetic sort; but theeffect throughout the house is like a revelation of a seat of thegentry in the times of Elizabeth, preserved and made even morecharming by worthy successors. Knole House, near Seven-Oaks, Kent, is one of the largestexisting mansions of the Elizabethan age, from which a great. KNOLE HOUSE. 361 deal of it dates, although externally the style is chiefly modifiedTudor, and internally it is English Renaissance. Its gabled orembattled stone walls, gray and venerable, enclose an area offive acres which includes two main courts, five or six of smallersize, and buildings containing more than three hundred an effect of picturcsqueness on a grand scale it is perhapsunsurpassed, and scarcely rivalled, by any other domesticstructure of its antiquity in England. Knole, says Neale, has been a remarkable Mansion fromthe time of the Conquest. It had been held by many illustri-ous families when, in 1456, it was bought by the Archbishopof Canterbury, who rebuilt it and left it to be an official palace ;but it became Crown property near the middle of the nextcentury. The illustrious titles of Cardinal Pole, of Warwick,Northumberland, and Leicester, were afterwards associated withit, until Queen Elizabeth, about 1
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