Tower (this in the hall is one hundred and seventy feet high, and built above the chapel), and the style is sixteenth-century French, florid and costly.  The plan is perhaps unique in England, and comfort has been attained, though one would hardly believe it, such size seeming to swamp everything except show.  The description of the house, as given by a visitor there, reads like that of a palace:  “The hall is an octagonal room in the centre of the house about seventy-five feet in length and from thirty to forty broad:  on each side, at the end farthest from the entrance, are two doors leading into anterooms—­one the ante-drawing-room, and the other the ante-dining-room; each is lighted by three large windows, and is thirty-three feet in length:  they are fine rooms in themselves, and well-proportioned.  From these lead the drawing-room and the dining-room respectively, both exceedingly grand rooms, ingenious in design and shape, each with two oriel windows and lighted by three others and a large bay window:  this suite completes the east side.  The south is occupied by the end of the drawing-room and a vast library—­all en suite.  The library is lighted by four bay windows, three flat ones and a fine alcove, and the rest of the main building to the west is made up of billiard- and smoking-rooms, waiting-hall, groom-of-chambers’ sitting- and bed-rooms, and a carpet-room, besides the necessary staircases.  This completes the main building, and a corridor leads to the kitchen and cook’s offices:  this corridor, which passes over the upper part of the kitchen, branches off into two parts—­one leading to an excellently-planned mansion for the family and the private secretary, and another leading to the stables, which are arranged with great skill.  The pony stable, the carriage-horse stable, the riding horses, occupy different sides, and through these are arranged, just in the right places, the rooms for livery and saddle grooms and coachmen.  The laundry, wash-house, gun-room and game-larder occupy another building, which, however, is easily approached, and the whole building, though it extends seven hundred feet in length, is a perfect model of compactness.  Great facilities are given to any one who desires to see it.”  The mention of a “mansion for the family” shows how the associations of a home are lost in this wilderness of magnificence:  indeed, I remember a remark of a person whose husband had three or four country-houses in England and Scotland and a house in London, that “she never felt at home anywhere.”

[Illustration:  Chester cathedral and city wall.]