stated times the relic is exhibited to a crowd of devotees, who file slowly past to kiss it.  Some congealed blood of Our Lord is also said to be preserved, after remarkable vicissitudes of loss and recovery, in the Norman Abbey of Fecamp; and mediaeval Gloucestershire once boasted as big a treasure, which brought great concourse and popularity to the Cistercian house of Hayles.  Pass beneath the archway of the Maison de l’Ancien Greffe, cross the sluggish canal, and turn sharply to the left, and follow, first the cobbled Quai des Marbriers, and afterwards its continuation, the Quai Vert.  Pacing these silent promenades, which are bordered by humble cottages, you have opposite, across the water, as also from the adjacent Quai du Rosaire, grand groupings of pinnacle, tower, and gable, more delightful even, in perfection of combination and in mellow charm of colour, than those “domes and towers” of Oxford whose presence Wordsworth confessed, in a very indifferent sonnet, to overpower his “soberness of reason.”  “In Brussels,” he says elsewhere in his journal, “the modern taste in costume, architecture, etc., has got the mastery; in Ghent there is a struggle; but in Bruges old images are still paramount, and an air of monastic life among the quiet goings-on of a thinly-peopled city is inexpressibly soothing.  A pensive grace seems to be cast over all, even the very children.”  This estimate, after the lapse of considerably more than half a century, still, on the whole, stands good.

“In Ghent there is a struggle.”  Approaching Ghent, indeed, by railway from Bruges, and with our heads full of old-world romance of Philip van Artevelte, and of continually insurgent burghers (for whom Ghent was rather famous), and of how Roland, “my horse without peer,” “brought good news from Ghent,” one is rather shocked at first, as we circle round the suburbs, at the rows of aggressive new houses, and rather tempted to conclude that the struggle has now ended, and that modernity, as at Brussels, has won the day at Ghent.  Luckily the doubt is dissipated as we quit the splendid Sud station—­and Belgium, one may add in parenthesis, has some of the most palatial railway-stations in the world—­and find ourselves once again enmeshed in a network of ancient thoroughfares, which, if they lack wholly the absolute quiet, and in part the architectural charm, of Bruges, yet confront us at every corner with abundance of old-world charm.  I suppose the six great things to be seen in Ghent are the cathedral of St. Bavon (and in the cathedral the great picture of the “Adoration of the Lamb,” by Hubert and Jan van Eyck); the churches of St. Michel, with a “Crucifixion” by Van Dyck, and St. Nicholas; the wonderful old houses on the Quai des Herbes; the splendidly soaring Belfry; and possibly the Grande Beguinage, on the outskirts of the town.  The cathedral has the usual solitary west tower, as at Ely, that we have now come to associate—­at Ypres and Bruges—­with typical Belgian churches.