Renard, the house of the silk-mercers and haberdashers; Maison Cornet, the house of the boatmen, or “batelliers”; La Louvre, the house of the archers; La Brouette, the house of the carpenters; Le Sac, the house of the printers and booksellers; the Cygne, the house of the butchers; and other houses that need not be specified at any greater length, of the tailors, painters, and brewers—­this is probably the completest and most splendid example of an ancient city market-square that now remains in Europe, and absolutely without rival even in Belgium itself, though similar old guild-houses, in the same delightful Flemish fashion, may still be found (though in this case with admixture of many modern buildings) in the Grande Place at Antwerp.  It was in this splendid square at Brussels that the unhappy Counts of Egmont and Horn were brutally done to death, to glut the sinister tyranny of Spanish Philip, on June 5, 1568.

Also, in addition to these two superlative antiquities, two modern buildings in Brussels, though for widely different reasons, can hardly be passed over under plea of lack of space.  Crowning the highest point of the city, and towering itself towards heaven in a stupendous pile of masonry, is the enormous new Palais de Justice, probably the most imposing law courts in the world.  English Law undoubtedly is housed with much greater modesty, though not without due magnificence, in the altogether humbler levels of the Strand.  Also in the High Town—­which is the modern quarter of Brussels, in contrast with the mediaeval Low Town, which lies in the flat below—­is the Royal Museum of Ancient Paintings, which probably divides honours with the Picture Gallery at Antwerp as the finest and most representative collection of pictures of the Netherlandish school in the world.  Here you may revel by the hour in a candlelight effect by Gerard Dow; in the poultry of Melchior d’Hondecoeter; in a pigsty of Paul Potter’s; in landscapes by Meindert Hobbema; in a moonlight landscape of Van der Neer’s; in a village scene by Jan Steen; in the gallant world of Teniers; and in the weird imaginings of Pieter Brueghel the younger.  The greatest pictures in the whole collection, I suppose, are those by Rubens, though he has nothing here that is comparable for a moment with those in the Picture Gallery and Cathedral at Antwerp.  Very magnificent, however, is the “Woman taken in Adultery,” the “Adoration of the Magi,” the “Interceder Interceded” (the Virgin, at the prayer of St. Francis d’Assisi, restrains the angry Saviour from destroying a wicked world), and the “Martyrdom of St. Livinius.”  This last, however—­like the “Crucifixion” in the Antwerp Gallery; like Van Dyck’s picture in this collection of the drunken Silenus supported by a fawn; and like Rubens’ own disgusting Silenus in our National Gallery at home—­illustrates unpleasantly the painful Flemish facility to condescend to details, or even whole conceptions, the realism of which is unnecessarily deliberate and coarse.  Here, in this death of St. Livinius, the executioner is shown in the act of presenting to a dog with pincers the bleeding tongue that he has just cut out of the mouth of the dying priest.