the church of San Giovanni in
Laterano at Rome, though he did not add the dome. The floor he had laid
of coloured marbles, patterned in the most delicate designs; the marble
had been designed for Ferdinand VII of Spain, and cost L10,000. The
walls and arches are as richly decorated as the floor. There are four
frescoes by Joseph Severn; Eleanor of Castile represents Fortitude;
Esther, Prudence; Ruth, Meekness; Patience could only be Penelope. The
effect of the shining stone and painted arches is of extraordinary
brilliance and completeness--the completeness of an unrivalled
collection. But there is somewhere something bizarre; perhaps it is the
setting. Marble demands marble neighbours, and the setting of these
exotic treasures is the simple beauty of English parkland. The little
church fits better with the great trees and the green grass. The
building is nothing; the interior has the grace and the light of a
cathedral chapel. Lord Monson decorated Gatton Church with the
magnificence with which he imagined the hall, but his ideal for the
church was quieter. He bought carved wood of the most exquisite
workmanship and set it wherever the church could hold it; a pulpit and
an altar from Nuremberg, said to be by Duerer, but the critics dispute
it; the elaborately fitted stalls came from a monastery in Ghent, and
altar rails from Tongres. Glass for the windows, of deep and glowing
colours, he had from Aerschot, near Louvain; the east window, a strange
painting, shows the eating of the Passover. One property the little
church lacks; Lord Monson never gave it a wooden ceiling, and the
ill-shaped stone vault is too white and cold for the stalls.

[Illustration: _View from near Reigate._]

The great coaching days have many memories of Reigate. The coaches
changed horses at the Swan and the White Hart, and at the White Hart
to-day's Brighton coach stops, I think, for lunch. But when Shergold
wrote his _Recollections of Brighton in the Olden Time_, he speaks of
the inn at which the Brighton coach stopped in the days of the Regency
as the King's Arms. Inns have a most confusing habit of changing their
names. When John Taylor, the Water Poet, in 1636, made his _Catalogue of
Taverns in Ten Shires about London_, he found some seventy or eighty
taverns in Surrey, but out of the forty-nine which he mentions by name,
hardly a dozen would answer to their old signboards to-day. The Reigate
White Hart in Taylor's day was the Hart.

Acco