. The gradual approach to
them had something which spoke both to the imagination and the feelings.
Imagine the carriage driving very slowly onwards, when you suddenly hear
a sweet female voice carrolling away in all the wildness of nature, and
this without knowing whence it comes. On a sudden, coming nearer the
bottom of the hill, you see on one side of the road a cottage chimney,
peeping as it were from a tuft of trees in a dell, and immediately
afterwards, coming in front, behold a girl picking grapes for the press,
and chearfully singing over her toil. There are few of these cottages
but what have a garden fronting the road, and some of these gardens, in
the season of fruit and flowers, are inimitably beautiful. Where is it
that I have read, that a Frenchman has no idea of gardening? Nothing can
be more false: the French peasants infinitely excell the English of the
same order in the knowledge and practice of this embellishment.

Nothing can be more obscure, more melancholy, than the situation of
Chambord; it is literally buried in woods, and the building, immense as
it is, is not visible till you are within some hundred yards of it. The
woods are not merely on one side, but entirely surround it, leaving only
a park in front, through the midst of which slowly flows a narrow river.
The day was overclouded, and I think I never beheld a more melancholy
scene.

The style of building is strictly Gothic, and the architecture,
considering the order, is very good. It was built by Francis the First,
who, on his return from Spain, commanded the ancient chateau of the
Counts of Blois to be destroyed, and built this in its place. He is said
to have employed eighteen hundred workmen for twelve years, and even
then it was left unfinished. It is moated and walled round, and has
every appendage of the Gothic castle, innumerable towers and turrets,
drawbridges and portals. If seated upon an hill, it would be impossible
to conceive a finer object.

The apartments correspond with its external magnitude; they are large
and spacious, but the effect of them is destroyed by what is very common
in old Gothic buildings; cross-beams from one side of the room to the
other. There is a silly story, that Catherine of Medicis had them so
placed by the advice of an astrologer, who having cast her nativity
discovered that she was in danger of perishing by the fall of an house.
The great Marshal Saxe lived and died in this chateau: the room in whic