building of the knight’s hall, of more pretension, and which was much larger.  The great gate opens on a small elevated terrace, that is beautifully shaded by fine trees, and which commands a view, second, I feel persuaded, to but few on earth.  I do not know that it is so perfectly exquisite as that we got from the house of Cardinal Rufo, at Naples, and yet it has many admirable features that were totally wanting to the Neapolitan villa.  I esteem these two views as much the best that it has ever been my good fortune to gaze at from any dwelling, though the beauties of both are, as a matter of course, more or less shared by all the houses in their respective neighbourhoods.  The great carriage-road, as great carriage-roads go on such a mountain-side, comes up to this gate, though it is possible to enter also by the other.

Blonay, originally, must have been a hold of no great importance, as neither the magnitude, strength, nor position of the older parts, is sufficient to render the place one to be seriously assailed or obstinately defended.  Without knowing the fact, I infer that its present interest arises from its great antiquity, coupled with the circumstance of its having been possessed by the same family for so long a period.  Admitting a new owner for each five-and-twenty years, the present must be somewhere about the twenty-fifth De Blonay who has lived on this spot!

A common housemaid showed us through the building, but, unfortunately, to her it was a house whose interest depended altogether on the number of floors there were to be scrubbed, and windows to be cleaned.  This labour-saving sentiment destroys a great deal of excellent poetry and wholesome feeling, reducing all that is venerable and romantic to the level of soap and house-cloths.  I dare say one could find many more comfortable residences than this, within a league of Vevey; perhaps “Mon Repos” has the advantage of it, in this respect:  but there must be a constant, quiet, and enduring satisfaction, with one whose mind is properly trained, in reflecting that he is moving, daily and hourly, through halls that have been trodden by his fathers for near a thousand years!  Hope is a livelier, and, on the whole, a more useful, because a more stimulating, feeling, than that connected with memory; but there is a solemn and pleasing interest clinging about the latter, that no buoyancy of the first can ever equal.  Europe is fertile of recollections; America is pregnant with hope.  I have tried hard, aided by the love which is quickened by distance, as well as by the observations that are naturally the offspring of comparison, to draw such pictures of the latter for the future, as may supplant the pictures of the past that so constantly rise before the mind in this quarter of the world; but, though reasonably ingenious in castle-building, I have never been able to make it out.  I believe laziness lies at the bottom of the difficulty.  In our moments of enjoyment we prefer being led, to