ough avenues of elms, with lamps at regular
distances.

I also visited Marli, which is chiefly remarkable for the machine which
raises water from the Seine to the height of five hundred feet. St. Cyr
was the retreat of Madame de Maintenon, and Malmaison was the residence
of Buonaparte, when first consul; but it is far inferior to St. Cloud.
The palace of St. Germain is in a situation inferior to none I had seen.
My expectations had however been particularly raised by the accounts I
had heard of Versailles, which has at all times been the object of the
admiration of the French; and it is certainly better suited to their
ideas of grandeur than to ours.

This palace is about four leagues distant from Paris. The approach to it
has nothing of that magnificence that I had been led to expect, and the
road is in bad repair. On my arrival, I found it was impossible to gain
admittance into the palace, which was undergoing a thorough repair,
rendered indispensable by neglect during the last twenty years. The
number of workmen employed is stated to amount to two thousand. It is a
vast pile of building, and certainly one of the most famous royal
residences in Europe. A Frenchman tells you with exultation of the vast
sums which have been expended in its construction, and thinks that a
sufficient proof of its magnificence. An Englishman, however, will very
naturally be out of patience at the praises bestowed on gardens laid out
in that taste which has been so long exploded in England, and cannot
help exclaiming with the poet--

"Lo! what huge heaps of littleness around!"

In front of the palace is a vast terrace which you mount with
considerable difficulty by innumerable flights of stairs. To occasion an
unexpected treat to the admirers of art, by excluding every thing
natural, the whole of this elevation is abundantly supplied with ponds
and water-works. The grand vista in front of the palace is formed into a
canal, and no description can give a more just idea of these boasted
gardens than the following lines of Pope; the _only_ difference being,
that the water-works of Versailles are put in motion the first Sunday
of every month, and remain stagnant the rest of the year.

"Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.
The suffering eye inverted nature sees,
Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees;
With here a fountain, never to be play'd,
And the