If Ypres is to be praised appropriately as a still delightful old city that has managed to retain to a quite singular degree the outward aspect and charm of the Middle Ages, one feels that one has left one’s self without any proper stock of epithets with which to appraise at its proper value the charm and romance of Bruges.  Of late years, it is true, this world-famed capital of West Flanders has lost something of its old somnolence and peace.  Malines, in certain quarters, is now much more dead-alive, and Wordsworth, who seems to have visualized Bruges in his mind as a network of deserted streets, “whence busy life hath fled,” might perhaps be tempted now to apply to it the same prophetic outlook that he imagined for Pendragon Castle: 

    “Viewing
    As in a dream her own renewing.”

One hopes, indeed, that the renewing of Bruges will not proceed too zealously, even if Bruges come safely through its present hour of crisis.  Perhaps there is no big city in the world—­and Bruges, though it has shrunk pitiably, like Ypres, from its former great estate in the Middle Ages, has still more than forty thousand souls—­that remains from end to end, in every alley, and square, and street, so wholly unspoilt and untouched by what is bad in the modern spirit, or that presents so little unloveliness and squalor in its more out-of-the-way corners as Bruges.  Bruges, of course, like Venice, and half a dozen towns in Holland, is a strangely amphibious city that is intersected in every direction, though certainly less persistently than Venice, by a network of stagnant canals.  On the other hand, if it never rises to the splendour of the better parts of Venice—­the Piazza and the Grand Canal—­and lacks absolutely that charm of infinitely varied, if somewhat faded or even shabby, colour that characterizes the “Queen of the Adriatic,” there is yet certainly nothing monotonous in her monotone of mellow red-brick; and certainly nothing so dilapidated, and tattered, and altogether poverty-stricken as one stumbles against in Venice in penetrating every narrow lane, and in sailing up almost every canal.  Of Venice we may perhaps say, what Byron said of Greece, that

    “Hers is the loveliness in death
    That parts not quite with parting breath”;

whilst in Bruges we recognize gladly, not death or decay at all, but the serene and gracious comeliness of a dignified and vital old age.

We cannot, of course, attempt, in a mere superficial sketch like this, even to summarize briefly the wealth of objects of interest in Bruges, or to guide the visitor in detail through its maze of winding streets.  Two great churches, no doubt, will be visited by everyone—­the cathedral of St. Sauveur and the church of Notre Dame—­both of which, in the usual delightful Belgian fashion, are also crowded picture-galleries of the works of great Flemish masters.  The See of Bruges, however, dates only from 1559; and even after that date the