It is announced that Limnerslease at Compton near Guildford, house of the late Mrs. Mary Watts, widow of the great painter and sculptor. is to be sold. Several of Watts's pictures were painted there, and close by the house is a gallery containing about 50 of his paintings, one or two sculptures, and a number of his drawings and studies for larger works. Connected with this is n small pottery works, ruħ by a Guild of Potters, where they make the most charming figurines, animals, birds, fauns, satyrs, incurably romantic, en obvious offence to an age which prefers Epstein, yet keeping alive the Watts tradition against the day when artists will grow tired of trying to impose ugliness upon us for beauty.
But it might be hard for the most determined Bloomsburyite to compose frightfully in the surroundings of Compton. Approached by a steep descent along: the southern face of the Hog's Back, it is one of those amazing little English villages which seem as if they ought to be put away every night with the children's toys. I doubt whether there is a house in it under 200 years old, and in the centre is the oddest little church, largely Norman. though I believe parts of it are said to be Sexon, with some very primitive 12th century glass in the east window, and a leper squint, and a figure of a crusader rudely scratched on the wall at the time when the original was going off to Palestine with the Lion Heart, I am told that Mrs. Watiss house is as charming as its surroundings, and it would be delightful to live there. But then I suppose one would never get any servants and the moed in which one longs for sylvan retreats is mot always enduring especially in damp, dark winter days.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.