Comines, that statesman and historian who
was the greatest observer of his time. He
looks silently on, with an involuntary smile
playing now and then about the corners of
his mouth, and reins in his horse, somewhat
hustled by that splendid throng. A usurer
with nightcap and spectacles, his scales and
his leathern money-bags, seems to grow out
of the shadow of that antiquated room which
juts forward and overhangs the sluggish
canal to Louvain. A boor, his beer cups and
his dram, may be made at once to fill the
tavern summer-house beside it. But war,
plague, and famine have swept over the land.
The rude mountaineers of Switzerland have
broken the ranks of Charles, and cheeked the
pride of his brilliant court. Malines has been
taken by the Spanish, the Dutch, the English,
and the French. So the rash duke and the
shrewd politician, the dainty dames and
stately cavaliers, the usurer and the boor,
fade away into chaos, and you find yourself
beneath the massive tower of the cathedral.

Look up at the truncated steeple. It is as
lofty as St. Paul's, and would have been six
hundred and forty feet high, had it been
completed; but, although begun in fourteen
hundred and fifty-two, the design is not
finished to this day, so that it may silently
suggest to you an homily on the vanity of
great intentions. Within is an altar-piece by
Rubens, the princely painter, who called
ambassadors his colleagues, and was the
friend of kings. The Last Supper is the
subject, and the heads of the apostles have all
his striking excellence of expression, the
flowing draperies his usual free bold touch;
but the figure of the Redeemer is ill done,
and the canvas has been injured. In the
church of St. John you will likewise find the
Adoration of the Magi, the Miraculous
Draught of Fishes, and a receipt for the
prices paid for those pictures (one hundred
florins each day's work), all by the hand of
the grand old Fleming. In another church
is a famous picture of the Crucifixion, a
master-piece of Vandyke, the handsome
courtier who married an earl's daughter.
Look on before you leave those churches,
look in wondering admiration at their
beautifully carved pulpits. Every group is
full of fearful hidden meanings and dark
monkish conceits. The men who wrought
them have some died violent deaths by their
own hands, their minds being overtasked and
stimulated by that exciting and gloomy toil.
Cast, therefore, no hasty tourist's glance at
their excellence, but pause before each
reverently, as perhaps the labour of a lifetime,
the whole embodied feelings of some earnest
spirit whose aspirings ended there. Every
group is worth a separate study, for there is
not a stroke of the sculptor's chisel but was
limned by a thought.

Saunter past the Arsenal, the Town Hall,
the Cannon Foundry, the College, the
Academy of Arts, and the Mont de Piété; mark
the site of the fortifications which were
demolished by the French in eighteen hundred
and four. Take especial note of the well-
managed new slaughter-houses without the
town. Then pause before Tuerlinkx's statue
of Margaret of Austria, and while you
remember the singular death of that imperial
lady, hearken to the chimes which have rung
you so merrily through your walk—the
musical chimes of Belgium, with a cheerful
warning in every bell. Observe, as you linger
there, the subdued bustle of the streets, as
they gradually wake up in the afternoon,
towards the end of the siesta which the
Flemish borrowed from Spain. First appear
the buxom milkwomen going their rounds;
an odour of delicately roasted coffee soon
pervades the atmosphere; and after a little
while, forth comes the archbishop, an
unassuming gentleman, though primate of all
Belgium, with four thousand pounds a-year.
He stays to speak to some tenants of the
Beguinage, a noble charity which supports
eight hundred aged widows. Near them,
with a professional step, marches the military
commandant; a pale-cheeked functionary of
the Tribunal of Primary Jurisdiction paces,
in grave talk with a professor from the
Ecclesiastical Seminary. Here is a civil engineer
employed by the railway; and there his
plump worship, a civic dignitary. Resume
your walk, and you may see the French
emigrant general, with his trim upright
figure, his high-bred courtly bow to the
brewer's wife, and his careworn sorrowful
aspect, when the smile with which he raised
his hat has died away. Thriving tradesmen's
families now go to take their after-dinner
gossip at the railway station; the English,
who reside here for economy, muster in the
pretty public gardens; the blythe lassie of
fifteen trips bashfully homeward from the
convent school. Oh, how angry she is if any
one sees her, especially that impudent boy,
Edward Wilkins! Well, well, pretty miss
(let us own it), it is undignified to be wise;
and the estimable sister who seems to you
such a mine of knowledge, would surely give
it all for your elastic step and silvery laugh.
But we are strangers, dear reader, and must
not intrude on any of these parties gathering
so sociably together. Let us pretend not to
notice them, and pay a visit to the lace-
workers. I should take off my hat and apo-
logise to the ladies, while I explain that
Malines has long been famous for a lace
coarser and stronger than that of Brussels.
Mechlin lace, properly so called, has been
surpassed by that of Nottingham, but jealous
Malines says much of that which is now sold
as Brussels lace is made there. The first
place we enter is a grocer's shop; there, in a
back room, are some very little maidens at
work; each has a cushion on her knees, with
a battalion of pins stuck into it. Each
winsome body has two small knobby sticks in
her hand; to the sticks are attached strong