left these fine old churches to their original frescoes and time-stains. Throughout Belgium an evil spirit of renovation is rampant: the beauteous spire of the Brussels maison de ville looks now as new as it must have done six centuries ago; and St. Gudule is but a Dobbs' card-board model of some recent cathedralthe rime of eld being all diligently scraped away in detestable taste, and to the misery of antiquaries; as well rub the green patina from a coin, as the grey lichen from a quatre feuille.

Off in two flys for the rail, and (dropping baggage and little ones with nurse and courier at Malines) steamed on to Antwerp, arriving about twelve. Now, nobody's going to be at the trouble of describing anything, nor of indulging in any sort of criticism, as that is to be found at length in all manner of useful compendia; what I mean to do, en passant, is to jot down notes for future memory, which no one need understand who either is not on the spot, or is not going, or has not been there already. The double moat, greenly wooded ramparts, and zoological gardens, are worth a passing memory in the natural line; and, as for art, the exquisitely delicate spire of Antwerp Cathedral is perhaps the most perfect flower of architecture extant: but so much florid beauty outside tends to make the mind

disappointed with comparative plainness and poverty within the interior does not answer to the outside promise. Further, in nearly all of these beauteous Netherland churches, one finds fault, not unreasonably, at the constant mixture of gothic walls, windows, roofs, and columns, with Greek and Roman altar decorations it is incongruous. What might well suit St. Peter's at Rome, or our colder English St. Paul's, would be entirely out of sorts with Westminster Abbey: the house and its furniture do not agree together. Well: for more memories,-the cathedral possesses Rubens's chefs d'œuvre, "the elevation of the cross," and "the descent;" fine florid and masterly, but sketchy works. Rubens always seems to have dashed off his thoughts too burriedly; I prefer to see more of the quaint minuteness of religious Quentin Matsys: witness his wonderful portrait here of Christ, on marble. Then, there are the restorations, in carved oak, of the Cathedral stalls, rightly enough in florid gothic; and the usual amount of marble chapels, and tinselled altars, and pictures and statues; and all's said. Outside, remember Matsys' poetical blacksmithism in a fountain. Thence to St. Paul,-with its trumpery Calvary of casts in rockwork, its many pictures, carved confessionals, pulpit and al

tars; and the painful picture of Christ scourged. Thence to the Museum, full of Vandykes, Rubenses, and other tip-top colourists. The most suggestive picture there, however, is a small head of Christ crowned with thorns, by Quentin,-a face to be reverently remembered for its living agony and intense patience ;—and next to it, the duplicate Vandyke and Rubens' crucifixion one or other of these counterpart works must be a plagiarism. Vandyke's altarpiece works do not seem to me so carefully painted as his portraits; both he and Rubens

scamped" their church orders; in design and colouring, nobody can beat them; but like our dashing Sir Joshua, they covered canvass too quickly sometimes. You see, I am no enthusiast for this demi-god of Anversian idolatry, Peter Paul Rubens: they have lately set him up gigantic in the green-alleyed market-place,—have spoilt his palatial house by redecoration, and even worship him and his bodily in churches; one altar-piece I have just seen being to the honour and glory of Rubens, his two wives, his belle cousine Le chapeau de paille, his child, his father, and his grandfather, all painted amongst angels, &c., as a holy family!

The most splendid of Antwerp churches is undoubtedly St. Jacques; indeed it is every

way the richest in carved and coloured marbles, in pictures, confessionals, architectural stone and oak, and all other external religionism we have hitherto seen : having twenty-four marble chapels, all different, plenty of exquisite stained glass, and numberless other notabilia worthy of a volume. But all these churches are so wealthy in decoration, and so profuse in carvings of marble and oak, that when you've seen one, you've seen all : in going from one to another, you forget specialties. Thence to the Augustin Church,still full of Rubenses, and Vandykes, and Jordaens' a glorious pulpit here, with gilded canopy. Thence by glass arcades, &c., and round by the docks, and boulevard, and glacis; and chiefly to the Bourse, a sort of Alhambra, which modern renovation (though the glass roof, and iron pillars to match, are in very fair taste, and meteorologically useful) is doing its best to spoil, by scraping off all antiquity, and renewing the youth of those ancient Moorish arches, some of the last relics of the Spanish dominion hereabouts. We have thus exhausted Antwerp, after a cursory fashion, in four hours of the very hardest work; and the whole affair, inclusive of fares, and fees proper everywhere, has cost thirty francs between five persons.

The agriculture all this way, and passim

26

TREES OF LIBERTY.

hereabouts in the Netherlands, is comminuted into little patches of everything: it always puts me in mind of a table d'hôte dinner : tidy morsels of all manner of things by mouthfuls, in rapid and unexpected succession ;-no immense fields of wheat or hay, like our solid English helps of beef and mutton; but a rod a-piece of every conceivable sort of produce in the compass of ten acres is this owing to any law of partible heritage?—Before the quaint old Spanish Town-Hall of Anvers is a flourishing tree of liberty; and I have just heard that the wretched poplar affair before King Leopold's palace at Brussels [he has another on a small scale at Antwerp], is a tree of liberty also. Poor king! to be perpetually reminded by that crooked alder of the recent popular tenure by which he clings to monarchy. Antwerp, altogether, is not the picturesque old town I expected: though Ghentish, it is not Ghent; nor Bruges, nor even Malines,-much more modernized, more mercantile, and not half so mediæval: dull withal, and of a Portsmouth sea-faring vulgarity: nothing but its steeple, that most delicately crystallized bit of florid gothic, and the elaborate marble richness of St. Jacques, redeems it from touristic disappointings.

Returned to Malines, we got to the Hotel