feet long, and with its lofty central tower, that was built for the pride and need of Ypres, and as a market for the barter of its priceless linens, at a time when Ypres numbered a population of two hundred thousand souls (almost as big as Leicester at the present day), and was noisy with four thousand busy looms; whereas now it has but a beggarly total of less than seventeen thousand souls (about as big as Guildford), and is only a degree less sleepy than Malines or Bruges-la-Morte.  Ypres, again, like Arras, has lent its name to commerce, if diaper be really rightly derived from the expression “linen of Ypres.”  The Cloth Hall fronts on to the Grande Place, and, indeed, forms virtually one side of it; and behind, in the Petite Place, is the former cathedral of St. Martin.  This is another fine building, though utterly eclipsed by its huge secular rival, that was commenced in the thirteenth century, and is typically Belgian, as opposed to French, in the character of its architecture, and not least in its possession of a single great west tower.  This last feature is characteristic of every big church in Belgium—­one can add them up by the dozen:  Bruges, Ghent, Louvain (though ruined, or never completed), Oudenarde, Malines, Mons—­save Brussels, where the church of Ste. Gudule, called persistently, but wrongly, the cathedral, has the full complement of two, and Antwerp, where two were intended, though only one has been actually raised.  This tower at Ypres, however, fails to illustrate—­perhaps because it is earlier, and therefore in better taste—­that astounding disproportion in height that is so frequently exhibited by Belgian towers, as at Malines, or in the case of the famous belfry in the market-place at Bruges, when considered with reference to the church, or town hall, below.  In front of the High Altar, in the pavement, is an inconspicuous square of white stone, which marks the burial-place of Cornelius Jansen, who died of the plague, as Bishop of Ypres, in 1638.  The monument, if you can call it monument, is scarcely less insignificant than the simple block, in the cemetery of Plainpalais at Geneva, that is traditionally said to mark the resting-place of Calvin.  Yet Jansen, in his way, proved almost a second Calvin in his death, and menaced the Church from his grave with a second Reformation.  He left behind in manuscript a book called “Augustinus,” the predestinarian tenor of which was condemned finally, though nearly a century later, by Pope Clement XI., in 1713, in the Bull called Unigenitus.  Jansenism, however, had struck deep its roots in France, and still survives in Holland at the present day, at Utrecht, as a sect that is small, indeed, but not altogether obscure.  Jansen himself, it may be noted, was a Hollander by birth, having been born in 1585 at Akkoi in that kingdom.