the best of it, it is hard to find, much to admire, and anything at all to love, in these acres of dismally whitewashed walls, and long, feeble lines of arcades without capitals.  The inherent vice of Belgian architecture—­its lack of really beautiful detail, and its fussy superfluity of pinnacle and panelling—­seems to me here to culminate.  Belgium has really beautiful churches—­not merely of the thirteenth century, when building was lovely everywhere, but later buildings, like Mons, and St. Pierre at Louvain; but Antwerp is not of this category.  Architecturally, perhaps, the best feature of the whole church is the lofty spire (over four hundred feet), which curiously resembles in general outline that of the Hotel de Ville at Brussels (three hundred and seventy feet), and dates from about the same period (roughly the middle of the fifteenth century).  As usual in Belgium, it is quite out of scale; it is lucky, indeed, that the corresponding south-west tower has never been completed, for the combination of the two would be almost overwhelming.  It is curious and interesting as an example of a tower tapering upwards to a point in a succession of diminishing stages, in contrast with tower and spire.  France has something like it, though far more beautiful, in the thirteenth-century tower at Senlis; but England affords no parallel.  I am not sure who invented the quite happy phrase, “Confectioner’s Gothic,” but this tower at Antwerp is not badly described by it.  It is altogether too elaborate and florid, like the sugar pinnacle of a wedding-cake.

This cathedral of Antwerp, however, though at the time that it was built a mere collegiate church of secular canons, and only first exalted to cathedral rank in 1559, is one of the largest churches in superficial area in the world, a result largely due to its possession, uniquely, of not less than six aisles, giving it a total breadth of one hundred and seventy feet.  Hung in the two transepts respectively are the two great pictures by Rubens—­the “Elevation of the Cross” and the “Descent from the Cross”—­that are described at such length, and with so much critical enthusiasm, by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his “Journey to Flanders and Holland.”  The “Descent from the Cross,” painted by Rubens in 1612, when he was only thirty-five years old, is perhaps the more splendid, and is specially remarkable for the daring with which the artist has successfully ventured (what “none but great colourists can venture”) “to paint pure white linen near flesh.”  His Christ, continues Sir Joshua, “I consider as one of the finest figures that ever was invented:  it is most correctly drawn, and I apprehend in an attitude of the utmost difficulty to execute.  The hanging of the head on His shoulder, and the falling of the body on one side, gives such an appearance of the heaviness of death, that nothing can exceed it.”  Antwerp, of course, is full of magnificent paintings by Rubens, though unfortunately the house in which he lived in