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.

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