e front is divided into compartments by slender and
lengthened buttresses and pilasters. The intervening spaces are filled
with basso relievos, evidently executed at one period, though by
different masters. A banquet beneath a window in the first floor, is in
a good _cinque-cento_ style. Others of the basso-relievos represent the
labors of the field and the vineyard; rich and fanciful in their
costume, but rather wooden in their design: the salamander, the emblem
of Francis I. appears several times amongst the ornaments, and very
conspicuously. I believe there is not a single square foot of this
extraordinary building, which has not been sculptured.--On the north
side extends a spacious gallery. Here the architecture is rather in
Holbein's manner: foliaged and swelling pilasters, like antique
candelabra, bound the arched windows. Beneath, is the well-known series
of bas-reliefs, executed on marble tablets, representing the interview
between Francis I. of France, and Henry VIII. of England, in the _Champ
du Drap d'or_, between Guisnes and Ardres. They were first discovered by
the venerable father Montfaucon, who engraved them in his _Monumens de
la Monarchie Francaise_; but to the greater part of our antiquaries at
home, they are, perhaps, more commonly known by the miserable copies
inserted in Ducarel's work, who has borrowed most of his plates from the
Benedictine.--These sculptures are much mutilated, and so obscured by
smoke and dirt, that the details cannot be understood without great
difficulty. The corresponding tablets above the windows are even in a
worse condition; and they appear to have been almost unintelligible in
the time of Montfaucon, who conjectures that they were allegorical, and
probably intended to represent the triumph of religion. Each tablet
contains a triumphal car, drawn by different animals--one by elephants,
another by lions, and so on, and crowded with mythological figures and
attributes.--A friend of mine, who examined them this summer, tells me,
that he thinks the subjects are either _taken_ from the triumphs of
Petrarch, or _imitated_ from the triumphs introduced in the _Polifilo_.
Graphic representations of allegories are susceptible of so many
variations, that an artist, embodying the ideas of the poet, might
produce a representation bearing a close resemblance to the mythological
processions of the 'mystic dream.'--The interior of the house has been
modernized: so that a beam covered with