eat of a bishopric that is still so
historic, and was formerly so important and even quasi-regal. Here,
however, you should notice, just as in the great neighbour church of
St. Jacques, the remarkable arabesque-pattern painting of the severies
of the vault, and the splendour of the sixteenth-century glass. St.
Jacques, I think, on the whole is the finer church of the two, and
remarkable for the florid ornament of its spandrels, and for the
elaborate, pendent cusping of the soffits 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