The porter’s lodge itself is a little museum of antiquities. There are the flint-lock muskets, the torch-holders, the brass-bound leather skullcaps, the cartridge-boxes, halberds, and other weapons of offence and defence belonging to the Earls and Dukes of Dorset from Jacobean to Mid-Georgian times: necessary equipments for the bodyguard of my lords and their visitors in those “good” old days. Here, too, you see the ancient horn-lanterns and the silver maces that were part of the display and the feeble illumination of those trains; and on the whole you are very glad that this is the twentieth century, and that these are outworn relics whose use has long since passed. The gatehouse tower and porter’s lodge lead into the first, or Green Court, one of the seven quadrangles included within the group of buildings, and so called from its lawns and to distinguish it from the next, flagged with pavement, and styled the Stone Court. The first is graced by two classic bronze statues: the “Venus Anadyomene” and the “Gladiator Repellens.” The Stone Court leads by an insignificant loggia, supported on Jacobean pillars, to the Great Hall, built between the years 1603-8 by that magnificent person the first Earl of Dorset, who in all those years gave constant employment to two hundred men, in his alterations and repairs, and spent £20,000 on furnishing a bedroom for the expected visit of James the First to him. The Great Hall was the banqueting-room. It has a boldly carved oak screen, in the characteristic Jacobean taste, but painted and grained, in some barbaric period, to _resemble_ oak! Oak, you will observe, painted to resemble itself! To paint the lily and to gild refined gold were no greater works of supererogation. It is difficult to understand why it was done, here and elsewhere. Ascending by the Painted Staircase, you come, in succession, to the Ball-room, the Reynolds Room, the Cartoon Gallery, the King’s Bedroom, the Chapel Room, Organ Room, Brown Gallery, Lady Betty Germaine’s rooms, old Billiard-room, Spangled Bedroom, Crimson Drawing-room, and so forth; seventeen in all, filled with the most wonderful old furniture, gigantic bedsteads, priceless china, paintings by the most revered masters, and portraits of a long dignified line of Sackvilles, Earls and Dukes of Dorset: great gentlemen and great patrons of the arts. [Illustration: THE STONE COURT, KNOLE.]