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16th. With vigour again to the attack of sights. First, to the cathedral of St. Gudule, where high mass was going on, in honour of this dressed-up doll, on a montagne of paper flowers; and where afterwards we heard a priest descanting from that miraculouslycarved pulpit, all about the efficacy of the Sacrament, just as our "Anglo-Catholics" do. Never was anything seen equal to that pulpit; but everybody knows it; and all the guidebooks tell you it is Milton's Paradise Lost, in elaborate oak; then there are the most clear and beautiful painted windows ever beheld, with all the stone tracery thereof as delicate as lace; and the Magi painted by Rubens, and all about the "miraculous hosts," wafers stabbed by unlucky Jews, who were burnt alive for having cut their fingers and blooded the paste in the transaction; remember some daubs of pictures, or tapestries, hung about the choir, in illustration thereof. After all this, and the multitudinous fidgetting of priests in golden copes, bowing, and kneeling, and crossing, and incensing, and busying themselves in every sort of way except spiritual worship and instruction of their far too patient flock,-we went in our crowd to the Town Hall, seeing some antique faded tapestries, and a few indifferent portraits. In a room close by were two

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couples, waiting to be married before the civil magistrate, one woman crying,-one more a morose-looking virago; and the pair of hapless swains (possibly to avoid the conscription) each with but one eye a piece. Truly, thought I, l'amour est aveugle. Thence passing two celebrated fountains of mannekins, producing water rather indelicately (one of the said mannekins being a Saint of this idolatrous town, and having his day of dressing up, with a procession of priests and incense and worship, watering as he must all the while!)—we trudged to the Musée, where a most mean cellar of sculpture, a feeble imitation of our gigantic British Museum gallery of natural history, and a second-rate collection of pictures, altogether disappointed me: all to be recollected with honour is an assumption of the Virgin, by Rubens,—a Magdalene ascending, by some Holbeinite, and a wonderful Simeon and Anna, by Philip de Champagne. Item some fossil Epiornis eggs,-capable of having produced (if they had not been addled) a Sindbad's roc apiece. At Bruges and Ghent, by the way, and elsewhere hereabouts, I find such names as Crayer and Pourbus, famous for painting, as they well deserve to be; but how little has English ignorance heard of them. After all this, drove to the Botanical Gardens,

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noting the sugar-cane, the banana in fruit, some splendid palms, and an aloe in flower; and, lastly, trudged a toilsome walk up and down divers dull streets of the hilly, crowded, and whitewashed town, getting home again by way of St. Hubert's lofty arcades, and the pretty Madeline Marché à fleurs.

17th. That preacher yesterday, at St. Gudule, was a true Sacramentarian and Transubstantiationist, just like certain other soidisant Church of England false priests I wot of :"Could the Saviour have deceived his church? Does He not say, 'This is my body and my blood?' and is not this bread flesh, and this wine blood, in all verity, though it seems to sense other than as to faith?" &c., &c. They totally ignore the fact that, after those so-considered miraculous words of consecration, Christ speaks of the elements still as "bread," and "this fruit of the vine." And what another inconclusive jump they take, when they go on to worship flesh and blood. If it could by possibility be true that the elements were miraculously changed, still they would only be the man Jesus, and not the God-Christ. The apostle says, "though I have known Christ in the flesh, henceforth know I him no more." "God is a spirit, and that which is

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born of the flesh, is flesh, &c." Every exaggeration of truth leads to destructive error.

Our grand Place Royale is a right noisy place to try to go to sleep in,-clatter of carriages, and hotel arrivals all night long; last night also very stormy, gusts of wind and rain. To-day I wake to a new birth-day, and am ashamed to think of its numero: the best comfort is that the heart's as young as ever. We don't care for the used-up Waterloo excursion, well known to Paterfamilias, and everybody else of old: it is now a case of mere corn fields, cockneyfied auberges, and fabricated relics: nor for the usual country drive to Leopold's country quarters: nor for his palace, (quoth the fox, disappointed of his grapes,) which we cannot see because it is being painted; and really Brussels has very little in it-less than Ghent or Bruges. Any place is soon exhausted by an industrious sight-seer, and beyond steeple-hunting, there never is too much to do; so I forlornly went again to the picture-gallery, and natural history museum, for little Henry and Walter's sakes, noticing a long-nosed monkey, a huge sort of sheeptailed cat, &c. Then, bought for the daughters divers Brussels-lace handkerchiefs; and so on to St. Sablon's, a fine church, full of statues, altars, and some modern paintings, by

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a Brussellian. Thereafter, to Notre Dame des Victoires, where beautiful gothic architecture is (as usual) deformed by whitewash, and the black marble mausoleum of Tours and Taxis is defaced by over-gaudy heraldry; containing also, notably, the miraculous Vierge à bateau ; a fine chaire de Verité, upheld by emblematical evangelists; the tomb of J. B. Rousseau ; and St. Hubert, with his crucifix-antlered stag. In the evening, took all my flock, as a treat, to the play an indifferent theatre in the arcade, and dullish altogether, except that little Harry and Walter gained a new idea in the mind-enlarging line.

Brussels we now consider quite used up: for besides things here noted, I and we have threaded all the streets, and seen, everywhere, all the little else to be seen. Nobody thinks of walking in the roadways of London; but in all continental towns you can walk nowhere else.

18th, Wednesday.-Up early, as usual; then to Notre Dame des Victoires again, a church next best seeing to the Cathedral, and in some things superior to it in interest: very ancient too, and of most exquisite simple gothic, built some seven hundred years. I wish they would be less lavish of whitewash; and could have

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