Page:A tour through the northern counties of England, and the borders of Scotland - Volume II.djvu/31

[ 19 ] the mansion point out the judgment as well as taste of Messrs. Adams and Paine, who were employed to regenerate this magnificent place. The dwelling apartments form a castellated fabric, raised upon an artificial mound in the centre of the inclosed area. These consist of the state bed-chambers, magnificently fitted up; the grand stair-case, singular but beautiful in plan, expanding like a lady's fan, and ornamented with a chain of escutcheons running round the cornices, displaying one hundred and twenty quarterings and intermarriages of the Percy family; the saloon, an apartment forty-two feet long, thirty-seven feet wide, and twenty high; the drawing-room, a large oval, forty-seven feet by thirty-live, and twenty-two high; the dining-room, fifty-four feet by twenty, finished in a style of Gothic, superlatively beautiful; the library, sixty-four feet long and twenty-three feet wide, in the same happy and appropriate manner; and the chapel, an apartment in which expence has reached its utmost limits. It is fifty feet long, twenty-one wide, and twenty-two high., and presents such a dazzling picture of Gothic decoration as is not, perhaps, to be equalled in the kingdom. The great window of York Minster has been chosen as the model of the chosen one, the ceiling of King's-College chapel for the pattern of the carving and