Brussels is seen to great advantage from the ancient ramparts which surround it.  I went entirely round the city in about two hours, and afterwards attended divine service, which was performed in English, to a congregation which proved the great number of English now here.  There are at present but few very strongly fortified cities in Belgium, compared with the vast number which it formerly contained.  The period is past, when, after the ablest engineers had exerted their utmost skill in the construction of fortifications around its cities, generals, not less distinguished, contended for the honour of reducing them.  Amongst numberless other instances, the siege of Ostend sufficiently attests how successful the engineers have been in rendering those places strong; and also bears ample testimony to the perseverance of the commanders who at last succeeded in taking them.  Ambrose Spinola entered Ostend in 1604, after a siege of above three years, during which the besieged lost 50,000 and the besiegers 80,000 men.  The siege and capture of Valenciennes might also be adduced, if testimony were wanting of the zeal and bravery of British armies and commanders.  But however justly these sieges are celebrated in modern times, the antiquarian who contends for the supremacy of past ages over the present, will not fail to instance the siege of Troy and the exploits of Achilles and Agamemnon, as a more distinguished instance of perseverance than any to be met with in these degenerate days, and if he should meet with some sceptic who insists that the heroes of Homer owe their existence only to the imagination of the poet, although he can assent to no such hypothesis, yet he will also instance the siege of Azotus, on the frontiers of Egypt, which Psammeticus, meditating extensive conquests, and thinking it beneath him to leave so strong a fortress unsubdued, is related to have spent 29 years of his reign in reducing.

As I was desirous of visiting Antwerp and Ghent, and as the period allotted for my tour was drawing to a close (a circumstance which the advanced season of the year gave me but little reason to regret) I left Brussels, enveloped in a fog, which might remind the English fashionables of those so prevalent in London during the gloomy season of November, and proceeded to Malines, 14 miles distant, formerly one of the greatest cities of Belgium, but now like too many other once celebrated places in that country, affording a melancholy contrast to its former splendour, and proving that in the vicissitude of all sublunary affairs, cities, as well as their inhabitants, are subject to decay.

     Non indignemur mortalia corpora solvi Cernimus exemplis oppida
     posse mori.