de la Grue [storks are in high odour all through Holland], and spent a useful and pleasant sunset hour, in ascending Malines cathedral tower, 554 steps: (Why will they always stop short of the obviously congruous number? why was the original Crystal Palace 1850 feet long, and not 1851,-the Hotel de Ville de Brussels tower 364 feet, and not 365, -and this 554, instead of the three lucky fives of a child's game of commerce?) Well, up we toiled, up, and up, and up that corkscrew staircase, passing the belfry of musical giants that clattered us a peal as we climbed,-and the mechanism of the huge clock, (the openwork face whereof, some fifty feet diameter, hangs upon the tower-top like a four-fold cobweb,) and the vasty drum of chimes, wound up twice each day for three hours, in order that Malines may have music at every quarter; and at last got to walk round the perilous balcony a-top, viewing Malines like a Dutch-toytown, red and white, many-gabled, gardened, canalled, and clean-streeted, close around,-and beyond it, Les-pays-bas, ironed out flat and fertile, straight-roaded, fringed with poplars, and intersected by water-courses. After a longish evening ramble through streets curiously full of architectural bits of beauty, home to repose and one's letter-case; by way of ensuring si I shall lence, giving the boys a spree with Pierre, to M. Linski, a conjuror in the fair, just opposite. A certain noted Royal Academician is here: he must be maddened with the difficulty of choosing a subject among so many beauties. The prison, Musée, Mairie, and Boucherie, are each and all most picturesquely turretted and arched,—in some parts also gilded and carved. recognize them all, no doubt, in exhibitions of pictures and high-art annuals; moreover, they are daguerreotyped on my mind's eye: but as to any patient description thereof, didactically and architecturally, the thing's tedious and impossible. So also of the many gabled old houses running up to points everywhere; and this Grande Place of beautiful forms,-in the midst of which stands Margaret of Austria, in marble, surrounded by a stone-pavement-facsimile of the openwork clock-faces on the Tower. Mechlin is a strange contrast to Antwerp, in the clock-tower line: the first is a solid, buttressed, cliff-like giant; the other a lightwinged, aerial archangel. Rubens's coarse Christs may be very anatomical, and true to man's fleshy suffering nature, but they are not divine: they are merely painful; unpleasant representations of human agony, muscular models of struggling life, or flaccid : death: they do not elevate the mind, but carnalize it the real overwhelms the ideal. Both here and at Antwerp, street idols are frequent; and by a manifest economy, the street lamps are made to do duty as lights of honour. 19th. The hotel de la Grue is a good house enough; and, as always, our rooms are splendidly furnished, full of marble, mahogany, and fine hangings; with the usual springy French beds. N.B.-Let every traveller bring his own soap, it is never found at hotels, as with us; and beware how they light you up with bougies -a friend of mine had a chandelier of twelve wax lights lit in his honour at an attempted cost of twelve francs! This morning we inspected the Cathedral; which the detestable spirit of over-cleanliness is just now white-washing all over inside, rubbing out the last relics of ancient frescoes. As always, the architecture is perfect, a most pure gothic; but the Romanesque marble altars and furniture offend my taste for the congruous: the pulpit represents the conversion of St. Paul. Remember some beautiful painted lancet windows over the high altar; and the brass doors; and the Jesuits at their dervish-like chaunting; and, as everywhere, the twelve gigantic marble apostles, sentinelling the nave columns; and the perpetual dressed-up dolls, and relics, and other trumperies. Thence, to the fine Græco-Roman Church of Notre Dame du Sacré cœur, which, from the perfect agreement between decoration and architecture, pleased me very much; -all is in good taste; and the pulpit, Adam and Eve and the Tree of Life with clouds and the Father, is about the grandest I have seen. Thence to another Notre Dame, wherein, if what is painted wood were really variegated marble, is to be seen the most superb church in Malines. But these churches pall upon the eye, and in the very cataloguing vex the ear: all are equally wealthy in carving of oak and marbles, pictures, gildings, idols, and all profusion of ecclesiastical furniture; they are museums wherein taste might spend at each a week, and superstition a lifetime. Service is perpetually going forward in them, at one altar after another-that is to say, priests in splendid copes, with gilt and flowered crosses, are everlastingly celebrating the Eucharist,to use their own phrase, “making God (!)" by dint of the magical words of consecration: and so the poor credulous people who leave all their religion to be got through by the priest, are always being sent empty away. Off again at twelve by rail to Liege, some three and a-half hours through a fertile and cultivated plain, rising into a little hilly beauty towards our journey's end: but with not much to particularize. About Louvain, the country seemed pretty, and guide-books informed of architectural delights; but we could not stop everywhere, and so-forward. Near Liege, the gradient being steep, we are pulled up to Hautpré by a rope; and soon coming to the top, have a grand view of the Belgian Birmingham, nearly as well supplied with tall chimnies, but more countryfied, and much prettier. Liege is quite an urbs in rure,-houses and manufactories dotted about among trees and hills, and winding streams, with turretted and spired and cupola'd churches here and there, picturesque enough. Within, however, most of the streets are narrow, wind-about, and roughly trottoired -dirty withal and smelly; and the rapid Meuse, from thunder-showers I suppose, a river of mud even such have been, perhaps from the like cause, all the Belgian streams and canals hitherto. Arrived, and having duly fed our famine, and arranged for our always numerous suite of rooms, we all set off in vast troop with a guide and Pierre to explore this ancient Legionis,' Liege. (So Cologne is 'Colonia,' |