In the square is a house within a court, now occupied as a school for girls, of the same aera as the Palais de Justice, and in the same Burgundian style, but far richer in its sculptures.  The entire 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 Ist, 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 Ist of France, and Henry VIIIth 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[111]; 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.—­Of one of the most perfect of the historical subjects, I send you a drawing:  it is the first in order in Montfaucon’s work, and exhibits the suite of the King of England, on their way from the town of Guisnes, to meet the French monarch.  Two of the figures might be mistaken for Henry himself and Wolsey, riding familiarly side by side; but these dignified personages have more important parts allotted them in the second and third compartments, where they appear in the full-blown honors of their respective characters.