of its arches—­features that lend it an almost barbaric magnificence that reminds one of Rosslyn Chapel.  Liege, built as it is exactly on the edge of the Ardennes, is far the most finely situated of any great city in Belgium.  To appreciate this properly you should not fail to climb the long flight of steps—­in effect they seem interminable, but they are really about six hundred—­that mounts endlessly from near the Cellular Prison to a point by the side of the Citadelle Pierreuse.  Looking down hence on the city, especially under certain atmospheric conditions—­I am thinking of a showery day at Easter—­one is reminded of the lines by poor John Davidson: 

    “The adventurous sun took Heaven by storm;
    Clouds scattered largesses of rain;
    The sounding cities, rich and warm,
    Smouldered and glittered in the plain.”

It is not often that one is privileged to look down so directly, and from so commanding a natural height, on to so vast and busy a city—­those who like this kind of comparison have styled it the Belgian Birmingham—­lying unrolled so immediately, like a map, beneath our feet.

From Liege, if you like, you may penetrate the Ardennes—­I do not know whether Shakespeare was thinking in “As You Like It” of this woodland or of his own Warwickshire forest of Arden; perhaps he thought of both—­immediately by way of Spa and the valley of the Vesdre, or by the valleys of the Ourthe and of its tributary the Ambleve; or you may still cling for a little while to the fringe of the Ardennes, which is also the fringe of the industrial country, and explore the valley of the Meuse westward, past Huy and Namur, to Dinant.  Huy has a noble collegiate church of Notre Dame, the chancel towers of which (found again as far away as Como) are suggestive of Rhenish influence, but strikes one as rather dusty and untidy in itself.  Namur, on the contrary, we have already noted with praise, though it has nothing of real antiquity.  The valley of the Meuse is graced everywhere at intervals with fantastic piles of limestone cliff, and certainly, in a proper light, is pretty; but there is far too much quarrying and industrialism between Liege and Namur, and far too many residential villas along the banks between Namur and Dinant, altogether to satisfy those who have high ideals of scenery.  Wordsworth, in a prefatory note to a sonnet that was written in 1820, and at a date when these signs of industrialism were doubtless less obtrusive, says:  “The scenery on the Meuse pleases one more, upon the whole, than that of the Rhine, though the river itself is much inferior in grandeur”; but even he complains that the scenery is “in several places disfigured by quarries, whence stones were taken for the new fortifications.”  Dinant, in particular, has an exceptionally grand cliff; but the summit is crowned (or was) by an ugly citadel, and the base is thickly clustered round with houses (not all, by any means, mediaeval and beautiful)