One gazes with pleasure and some surprise at its handsome streets, where everyone seems to live and thrive.  There is a general air of opulence.  The new streets, built under the last empire on the Paris model, offer the same rich and effective detail of gilded inscriptions running across the houses, balconies and flowers, with the luxurious cafes below, and languid flaneurs sitting down to their absinthe or coffee among the orange-trees.  These imposing mansions, built with judicious loans—­the ’OBLIGATIONS OF THE CITY OF LILLE’ are quoted on the Exchanges—­are already dark and rusted, and harmonize with the older portions.  At every turn there is a suggestion of Brussels, and nowhere so much as on the fine place, where the embroidered old Spanish houses aforesaid are abundant.

The old cathedral, imposing with its clustered apses and great length and loftiness, and restored facade, would be the show of any English town.  The Lillois scarcely appreciate it, as a few years ago they ordered a brand-new one from ‘Messrs. Clutton and Burgess, of London,’ not yet complete, and not very striking in its modern effects and decorations.  These vast old churches of the fourth or fifth class are always imposing from their size and pretensions and elaborateness of work, and are found in France and Belgium almost by the hundred.  And so I wander on through the showy streets, thinking what stirring scenes this complacent old city has witnessed, what tale of siege and battle—­Spaniard, Frenchman, and Fleming, Louis the Great, the refuge of Louis XVIII. after his flight.  All the time there is the pleasant musical jangle going on of tramcars below and bell-chimes aloft.  But of all things in Lille, or indeed elsewhere, there is nothing more striking than the old Bourse—­the great square venerable block, blackened all over with age, its innumerable windows, high roof, and cornices, all elaborately and floridly wrought in decayed carvings.  With this dark and venerable mass is piquantly contrasted the garish row of glittering shops filled with gaudy wares which forms the lowest story.  Within is the noble court with a colonnade of pillars and arches in the florid Spanish style; in the centre a splendid bronze statue of the First Napoleon in his robes, which is so wrought as to harmonize admirably with the rest.  In the same congenial spirit—­a note of Belgian art which is quite unfamiliar to us—­the walls of the colonnade are decorated with memorials of famous ’Stock Exchange’ worthies and merchants, and nothing could be more skilful than the enrichment of these conventional records, which are made to harmonize by florid rococo decorations with the Spanish genre and encrusted with bronzes and marbles.  This admirable and original monument is in itself worth a journey to see.