ass. About tastes there is no disputing; and
there are people, no doubt, who, for some odd reason, find this kind of
aggressive modernity in some way more attractive in Belgium than in
Kent. For myself, I confess, it hardly seems worth while to incur the
penalty of sea-sickness merely to play golf on the ruined shore of
Flanders.

III.

Of Brussels I do not propose to say very much, because Brussels,
although the brightest and gayest town in Belgium, and although
retaining in its Grande Place, and in the buildings that immediately
surround this last, as well as in its great church of St. Gudule
(which, in spite of popular usage, is not, and never was, in the proper
sense a cathedral), relics of antiquity of the very highest value and
interest, yet Brussels, as a whole, is so distinctively a modern, and
even cosmopolitan city, and has so much general resemblance to Paris
(though its site is far more picturesque, and though the place, to my
mind at least, just because it is smaller and more easily
comprehensible, is a much more agreeable spot to stay in), that it
seems better in a sketch that is principally devoted to what is old and
nationally characteristic in Belgium to give what limited space one has
to a consideration rather of towns like Louvain or Malines, in which
the special Belgian flavour is not wholly overwhelmed by false and
extraneous influences. St. Gudule, of course, should certainly be
visited, not only for the sake of the general fabric, which,
notwithstanding its possession of TWO west towers, is typically Belgian
in its general character, but also for the sake of its magnificent
sixteenth and seventeenth century glass, and especially for the sake of
the five great windows in the Chapelle du Saint Sacrement, which
illustrate in a blaze of gorgeous colour the story of how Jonathan the
Jew bribed Jeanne de Louvain to steal the three Consecrated Wafers,
from which oozed, when sacrilegiously stabbed by the sceptical Jew, the
Sacred Blood of a world's redemption. This story is told again--or
rather, perhaps, a similar story--in the splendid painted glass from
the church of St. Eloi that is now preserved at Rouen in the
Archaeological Museum. As for the Grande Place, or original
market-place of the city, which is bounded on one side by the
magnificent Hotel de Ville, on the opposite side by the rather heavy,
rebuilt Maison du Roi, and on the remaining two sides chiefly by the
splendid old seventeen