St. Mark’s Chapel, within the grounds of the college, stands opposite to St. Mark’s Terrace, a row of modern houses immediately beyond the cemetery. The grounds extend to the King’s Road, and contain about eleven acres, surrounded by a brick wall; and the entrance to the National Society’s training college is from that road. Stanley House, or Stanley Grove House, which was purchased in 1840 for upwards of £9000 by the society, stood upon the site of a house which Sir Arthur Gorges, the friend of Spenser, allegorically named by him Alcyon, {131} built for his own residence; and upon the death of whose first wife, a daughter of Viscount Bindon, in 1590, the poet wrote a beautiful elegy, entitled ‘Daphnaida.’ In the Sydney papers mention is made, under date 15th November, 1599, that, “as the queen passed by the faire new building, Sir Arthur Gorges presented her with a faire jewell.” He died in 1625; and by his widow, the daughter of the Earl of Lincoln, the house and adjacent land, then called the “Brickhills,” was sold, in 1637, to their only daughter, Elizabeth, the widow of Sir Robert Stanley; which sale was confirmed by her mother’s will, dated 18th July, 1643. The Stanley family continued to reside here until 1691, when by the death of William Stanley, Esq., that branch of this family became extinct in the male line. The present house, a square mansion, was built soon afterwards; and the old wall, propped by several buttresses, inclosing the west side of the grounds, existed on the bank of the Kensington Canal until it was washed down by a very high tide. This new or square mansion remained unfinished and unoccupied for several years. In 1724 it belonged to Henry Arundel, Esq. and on the 24th May, 1743, Admiral Sir Charles Wager, a distinguished naval officer, died here, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. After passing through several hands, Stanley Grove became the property of Miss Southwell, afterwards the wife of Sir James Eyre, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, who sold it in 1777 to the Countess of Strathmore. Here her ladyship indulged her love for botany by building extensive hot-houses and conservatories, and collecting and introducing into England rare exotics. “She had purchased,” says her biographer, “a fine old mansion, with extensive grounds well walled in, and there she had brought exotics from the Cape, and was in a way of raising continually an increase to her collection, when, by her fatal marriage, the cruel spoiler came and threw them, like loathsome weeds, away.”