en passant, and slubbered over Trianon.  I say, we saw nothing.  However, we had time to see that the great front is a lumber of littleness, composed of black brick, stuck full of bad old busts, and fringed with gold rails.  The rooms are all small, except the great gallery, which is noble, but totally wainscoted with looking-glass.  The garden is littered with statues and fountains, each of which has its tutelary deity.  In particular, the elementary god of fire solaces himself in one.  In another, Enceladus, in lieu of a mountain, is overwhelmed with many waters.  There are avenues of water-pots, who disport themselves much in squirting up cascadelins.  In short, ’tis a garden for a great child.  Such was Louis Quatorze, who is here seen in his proper colours, where he commanded in person, unassisted by his armies and his generals, left to the pursuit of his own puerile ideas of glory.

We saw last week a place of another kind, and which has more the air of what it would be, than anything I have yet met with:  it was the convent of the Chartreux.  All the conveniences, or rather (if there was such a word) all the adaptments are assembled here, that melancholy, meditation, selfish devotion, and despair would require.  But yet ’tis pleasing.  Soften the terms, and mellow the uncouth horror that reigns here, but a little, and ’tis a charming solitude.  It stands on a large space of ground, is old and irregular.  The chapel is gloomy:  behind it, through some dark passages, you pass into a large obscure hall, which looks like a combination-chamber for some hellish council.  The large cloister surrounds their buryingground.  The cloisters are very narrow and very long, and let into the cells, which are built like little huts detached from each other.  We were carried into one, where lived a middle-aged man not long initiated into the order.  He was extremely civil, and called himself Dom Victor.  We have promised to visit him often.  Their habit is all white:  but besides this he was infinitely clean in his person; and his apartment and garden, which he keeps and cultivates without any assistance, was neat to a degree.  He has four little rooms, furnished in the prettiest manner, and hung with good prints.  One of them is a library, and another a gallery.  He has several canary-birds disposed in a pretty manner in breeding-cages. in his garden was a bed of good tulips in bloom, flowers and fruit-trees, and all neatly kept.  They are permitted at certain hours to talk to strangers, but never to one another, or to go out of their convent.  But what we chiefly went to see was the small cloister, with the history of St. Bruno their founder, painted by Le Sceur.  It consists of twenty-two pictures, the figures a good deal less than life.  But sure they are amazing!  I don’t know what Raphael may be in Rome, but these pictures excel all I have seen in Paris and England.  The figure of the dead man who spoke at his burial, contains all the strongest and horridest