the Place de Meir (which is traversed by the tram on its way from the Est Station to the Place Verte), which was built by him in 1611, and in which he died in 1640, was almost entirely rebuilt in 1703.  There is another great Crucifixion by the master in the Picture Gallery, or Palais des Beaux Arts, which illustrates his exceptional power as well as his occasional brutality.”  The centurion, with his hands on the nape of his horse’s neck, is gazing with horror at the writhings of the impenitent thief, whose legs are being broken with an iron bar, which has so tortured the unhappy man that in his agony he has torn his left foot from the nail.”  It is questionable whether any splendour of success can ever justify a man in thus condescending to draw inspiration from the torture-room or shambles.

One would gladly spend more time in this Antwerp gallery, which exceeds, I think, in general magnificence the collections at Brussels and Amsterdam; and gladly would one visit the great fifteenth and sixteenth century churches of St. Jacques, St. Andre, and St. Paul, which not merely form together architecturally an important group of a strongly localized character, but are also, like the cathedral, veritable museums or picture galleries.  It is necessary, however, to conclude this section, to say a few words about Louvain, which, lying as it does on the main route from Brussels to Liege, may naturally be considered on our way to the northern Ardennes.

Louvain, on the whole, has been much more modernized than other Belgian cities of corresponding bulk, such as Bruges or Malines.  The road from the railway-station to the centre of the town is commonplace indeed in its lack of picturesque Flemish house-fronts or stepped, “corbie,” Flemish gables.  Louvain, in fact, unlike the two “dead” cities of West Flanders and Brabant, wears a briskly business-like aspect, and pulses with modern life.  I suppose that I ought properly to have written all this in the past tense, for Louvain is now a heap of smoking cinders.  The famous Town Hall has, indeed, so far been spared by ruffians who would better have spared the magnificent Cloth Hall at Ypres; between these two great buildings, the products respectively of the Belgian genius of the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries, “culture” could hardly hesitate.  The Hotel-de-Ville at Louvain is, indeed, an astonishing structure, just as the cathedral at Antwerp is astonishing; but one has to be very indulgent, or very forgetful of better models, not to deprecate this absolutely wanton riot of overladened panelling and bulging, top-heavy pinnacles.  The expiring throes of Belgian Gothic were a thousand degrees less chaste than the classicism of the early Renaissance:  few, perhaps, will prefer the lacelike over-richness of this midfifteenth century town hall at Louvain to the restraint of the charming sixteenth-century facade of the Hotel de Ville at Leiden.  Opposite the town hall is the huge fifteenth-century church of St. Pierre, the interior of which, still smothered in whitewash in 1910, was remarkable for its florid Gothic rood-screen and soaring Tabernacle, or Ciborium.  The stumpy fragment of tower at the west end is said once to have been five hundred and thirty feet high!  It is not surprising to read that this last, and crowning, manifestation of a familiar Belgian weakness was largely wrecked by a hurricane in 1604.