It is not, however, its intrinsic beauty which renders this church so fascinating. It possesses in common with many ancient things, not only buildings, but often trees, pictures, furniture, and notably jewellery, another attribute: there is about it a certain subtle influence which at once lays hold of the spectator and convinces him that it has a story. It has, and a thrilling one which, if it were written, would fill volumes and keep the reader spellbound from the opening words of the first sentence to the end of the last page.

This church, dedicated to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of burghers and merchants, and situated on the fringe of the Great Market, hard by their Town Hall and Guild-houses, has been, from time immemorial, the distinctive church of the bourgeoisie, in the same way that Saint Jacques sur Coudenberg has always been the distinctive church of the Court. Its life is bound up with the life of the city. It is the cradle of its liberties. Its hopes, its struggles, its victories, its defeats are intimately associated with it. In this church the city fathers were wont to assemble in the early days when they had no town hall. Its steeple was the town belfry—we say advisedly was, for it exists no more—home of the 'work-clock,' which every morning called the craftsman to his toil and in the evening sounded his release; and of the shrill tocsin, which in days of terror summoned him to arms, and when he had triumphed shouted victory. Here, too, in a lower storey, was the archive chamber where were laid up the records and the title-deeds—the charters which the town had bought at such great cost of blood and gold. Thrice burnt down and thrice rebuilt, until the close of the seventeen hundreds, this ancient tower was the pride and the glory of the men of Brussels, who regarded it as the outward and visible sign of their privileges as citizens and their rights as men. Nor is this all, the Church of Saint Nicholas is possessed of a mysterousmysterious power of attraction. Why men should single out this particular church in preference to all others is a question hard to answer. There is no ostensible reason for it: it is not the shrine of some great and popular saint, no famous relics are treasured here, nor miraculous image or picture. They are drawn to it in spite of themselves. Wherefore, who shall say? Enter when you will, it is never without worshippers, and what a motley throng they are! Of course that sex which the breviary so quaintly and aptly styles devout is the most in evidence. Women in shoals are there—women of every age and every complexion, all sorts and conditions of women: from the grande dame of ancient date, demure, aloof, dowdy, who, to her very rosary beads, is invested with an air of distinction, to the market-woman with her milk cans or her basket of fresh vegetables; from the fashion plate of the demi monde, perfumed and painted, to the snuffy crone in foul rags, who in the same breath asks an alms and tells her chaplet. And the men, if there be fewer of them, are no less heterogeneous—that sleek, smug-faced tradesman is trying a deal with Saint Anthony, he has made him an offering and promised more if only he will promote his undertakings; the youth in glorious apparel is commending, perhaps, to Saint Joseph an affair of the heart, or—who can tell?—perhaps he has a thorn in the flesh of which he would fain be rid; the shabby, middle-aged, sallow-faced wreck who stands before 'Onze Lieve Vrouw,' works, when he is not too drunk, as a journeyman tailor, in politics he is a social democrat, and if you were to ask him his religion, he would tell you that he was a libre penseur, but the woman who loves him is sick and believes, and he has slunk in here to put up a taper for her in honour of the 'Salus infirmorum,' the old man with trembling limbs and palsied head, who is painfully making the way of the Cross, was in his day a dashing spark who could make women's hearts throb and sometimes broke them. He has drunk to the dregs of the joys of life and experienced the after-taste, but all this is ancient history; he has long ago made his peace with God, and is quietly waiting now for the great metamorphosis. And there are children too, not many—for the neighbourhood is one of theatres, cafés, public buildings—ragged urchins some of them, with bare feet and pinched faces. The streets outside are cold and wet, or they are hot and dusty, and where else should these waifs seek shelter but in their Father's house?

Such are the devotees who frequent this mysterious shrine; and the visible objects of their devotion—the likenesses of the ghosts who haunt it, are no less varied than are they. Some of them are Neo-Gothic conceptions of the school of Saint Luke—tall, emaciated figures with gilded locks and pale, meek faces; others are of the time of the Renaissance, and are full-blooded, fleshy, human; others again are as old perhaps as the church itself, and these are the most interesting.

For how many centuries, for example, has the 'Man of Sorrows' sat by the western doorway silently asking of those who enter, 'Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?' A strangely pathetic figure this. The sculptor who modelled it must have had this text in his mind, 'There is no beauty in Him,' and this, 'The Lord has placed upon His shoulders the iniquity of us all.' The statue is of carved wood painted after life, but time and maybe the flare of tapers have rendered it almost black. It is quite nude save for a loin cloth, but someone, perhaps scandalised at this, has thrown a mantle of purple velvet now faded and moth eaten, over the shoulders. A relic is let into the instep of the left foot, which is defaced and partly worn away by the lips of innumerable troubled souls who have found consolation in their own sorrows by pitying the sorrows of Christ. For the rest, the church is not without charm from an æsthetic point of view—the axis of the choir is probably more decidedly inclined to the north-east than that of any other church that the visitor will call to mind: this and the divers styles of architecture in which it is built renders it at least picturesque. Moreover, though the stained glass which once glowed in its windows has long since disappeared, and though whitewash and plaster have effaced the frescoes and carving with which its walls were formerly adorned, the interior is still bathed in glowing tints: it is rich in old oak furniture, in objects of marble and copper and brass, in easel paintings and in devotional statues resplendent with colour and gold, and there are flowers too and red lamps, and withal and always a host of flaring tapers. But let not the reader be disappointed. There is much in this church which is tawdry, trivial, vulgar, which transgresses in a flagrant degree the canons of good taste; its splendour, it cannot be denied, is not always the splendour of truth. We have here the lustre of colour which, like charity, covers a multitude of sins, the fascination of old-world memories and the glamour of the picturesque. Added to this there are a few genuine works of art, notably some good pictures, which even the most fastidious need not be ashamed to admire; but since they are all of more recent date than the Middle Age, they do not come within the scope of these pages. And what, perhaps, it will be asked, has this farrago of modern idolatry for which space has been found to do with the Middle Age? This much—call it idolatry if you will, we have here mediævalism undiluted. The credulous folk who flock to the Church of Saint Nicholas are silly enough to believe, like their fathers in the thirteen hundreds, that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to say anything definite as to dates in the case of a building like the Church of Saint Nicholas, which has endured so many vicissitudes and suffered so much at the hands of restorers, but there can be little doubt that the great oblong columns which support the vaulting of the nave, and perhaps too the walls of the aisles, or at all events some portions of them, formed part of the original structure. But whether these things be old or new is a matter of little moment. The burghers' church is doomed. The decree has gone forth, and as soon as the leases of the old houses which cluster round it fall in, it is to be sacrificed to the demon progress. A street has to be enlarged or straightened, or the site is needed for a cab-stand or a public-house, or for some purpose equally objectionable. Death indeed sits close to our old friend, hence this disquisition. Albeit, he has so often escaped by the skin of his teeth that it is hard not to believe that means will even yet be found for still further prolonging his days. One thing is quite certain. If this piece of vandalism be carried out, it will be for the indelible shame of the whole city. A disgrace alike to the authors of the crime, and to those who by their indifference or their lack of energy, have connived at it. In Belgium there is a permanent Government commission for the preservation of ancient monuments, and a private society likewise exists, of which the raison d'être is similar, yet it seems that neither of these bodies have as much as thought it worth their while to lodge a formal protest.

More important from an architectural point of view than the Church of Saint Nicholas is the Church of Notre-Dame de la Chapelle. The foundation stone was laid by Duke Godfrey Longbeard in 1134, and though the greater portion of the existing structure is of more recent date, some interesting fragments still remain of the original building, notably the little Chapel of the Holy Cross and the beautiful façade of the south transept, which is pure Romanesque and richly adorned with sculpture. The plans were modified as the work progressed, and the rest of the south transept, the north transept and the chancel are in the style of the Transition. A nave and aisles were also added at this period, but they were destroyed by fire early in the fourteen hundreds, and rebuilt in the course of the century in the style then in vogue.

The collegiate Church of Saint Michael and Saint Gudule was commenced by Duke Henry I. in 1170, and the eastern wall of the ambulatory, with its Romanesque windows, date from this period. It took the men of Brussels five hundred years to complete this beautiful building, and hence it contains specimens of every style of architecture, and is on that account none the less interesting. We shall have something more to say of each of these churches in another chapter.

The civil architecture of this period is represented only by some fragments of the fortifications with which Lambert Balderick surrounded the city in 1040. They are scattered about here and there in various parts of the old town. There is a picturesque bit of wall for example in the garden of Saint Gudule's Presbytery, another piece has been incorporated into a house in the Rue des douze Apôtres, there is more in the Steenporte, and, most important of all, a tower some sixty feet high between the Halles Centrales and the Church of Saint Catherine.

This picturesque relic, which is called 'la Tour Noire,' was discovered when some old houses were demolished in 1887. At first the Corporation was for pulling it down, but fortunately Brussels at this time had a burgomaster who was not only an artist and an archæologist of repute, but also an enthusiastic amateur of mediæval architecture. After a long fight, M. Buls, who is still living though he has now withdrawn from public life, succeeded in saving the old tower, and thanks to his indefatigable efforts, it was later on restored by the town.

The Crypt of Saint Guy at Anderlecht

It is not, however, in the city itself, but in the suburb of Anderlecht, a mile and a half beyond the line of the outer ramparts, that the most interesting specimen of Romanesque architecture is to be found. Here we have no mere fragment, more or less defaced, but something complete in itself, something which has never been tampered with, something older, too, than any of the buildings of which we have just spoken, older, indeed, for the matter of that, than any other building in Brabant. In a word we have here an antique jewel of rare beauty, which has never been re-set nor re-cut: the subterranean Church of Saint Guy at Anderlecht remains to-day what it was when the builders planned it.

The earliest archives of the collegiate chapter of Anderlecht have disappeared, destroyed, no doubt, when the Flemings invaded Brabant under Louis of Maele, and hence the date of its foundation is not certainly known. Some chroniclers mention the year 800, others 914. Tradition says that it goes back to an epoch when there were only two other chapters in Brabant, the Chapter of Saint Berlinda, a niece of Saint-Amand, erected at Meerbeck towards the close of the six hundreds, and the famous Chapter of Nivelles, founded by Saint Gertrude, a daughter of Pepin of Landen, in 645; and we know from the Anderlecht Life of Saint Guy, the earliest life that has come down to us, that a dean and canons were certainly established there early in the ten hundreds. In any case there can be no doubt that this foundation was a very old one, and in all probability the present subterranean church is the church in which the first canons of Anderlecht were wont to perform their devotional offices.

True, it is said in the anonymous Life of Saint Guy, written most likely by a canon of Anderlecht in the opening years of the eleven hundreds, that about the time when his relics were first translated (1076) the canons of Anderlecht decided to build a new church, and from this, M. Schaeys, in his Histoire de l'architecture en Belgique, concludes that the present structure dates from this epoch, but the style of the architecture denotes a much earlier period, and the MS. account of what took place, in spite of the passage in question, which, read with the context, has clearly another meaning than that which M. Schaeys attributes to it, rather confirms than contradicts the evidence of the architecture.

The writer informs us that at this time the church at Anderlecht, by reason of its great age, was almost a ruin; some of the walls had actually fallen down, and others were in imminent danger of doing so. The clergy and the people therefore decided with one accord to sell the rich gifts which for years past pilgrims had been offering at the shrine of Saint Guy, and with the fund thus realised to build a new and more spacious church. If, then, the present crypt, which only measures forty feet by forty-eight, was the outcome of this decision, the former structure must indeed have been one of exceedingly narrow dimensions.

Although 'the poor man of Anderlecht' had during his lifetime been regarded as a saint, he was not publicly honoured as such until some forty years after his demise. About this time (1054) what our author calls a basilica, no doubt a small mortuary chapel, had been erected over his grave, and as it adjoined the church it now became necessary to pull it down in view of the proposed building operations. Hence the question arose, What should be done with the saint's body? The matter was referred to the bishop of the diocese, Gerard II. of Cambrai, 'who had succeeded the Lord Lietbert of blessed memory'—this fixes the date, Gerard received consecration in 1076—and he ordained that the body should be disinterred and provisionally laid to rest in the centre of the church until the new building should be ready for its reception.

The bishop's instructions, our author avers, were duly carried out, and in the last paragraph of his narrative, he informs us that 'the elevation of Saint Guy' was made by Bishop Odard on the 24th of July, 1112. It would seem, then, that from the earliest times there have been two churches at Anderlecht, an upper church and a lower church; that the former, having fallen into a ruinous state, was pulled down in the year 1076 and rebuilt on a larger scale, and that the new structure was completed in the summer of 1112, certainly not later than that date. Further, that the lower church, which no doubt had been more solidly built than the upper building, seeing that it was intended to support a superstructure, was still in 1076 in good repair, and that hence it was left standing.

That this was 'the church' where the relics of Saint Guy reposed during the interval which elapsed between the disinterment of 1076 and the 'elevation' of 1112 there can be no doubt whatever. Not only do the terms employed by the writer render this point certain, but we have the additional evidence of the empty tomb which still stands in the centre of the crypt. As to the date at which this interesting building was constructed the style of the architecture points to the eight hundreds. In form it is distinctly reminiscent of the early Christian basilica: it consists of an apsidal nave of three bays and double aisles, those which are adjacent to the nave are separated from it by cylindrical columns with capitals, which recall the Tuscan order, and from the outer aisles by two great square shafts without capitals, around each of which are clustered four columns similar to the columns of the nave. There is also a series of half columns of like design at intervals round the walls. These, and the piers, and the pillars of the nave support the vault, which is a simple cross vault without ribs. Each of the outer aisles is pierced in its west wall by a small round-headed doorway which opens on a staircase leading to the upper church, and the building is dimly lighted by six narrow slits of windows, which are likewise round-headed. The original high altar has disappeared, but there are two side altars which are of great antiquity, probably as old as the church itself—huge oblong blocks of stone without ornament or inscription. Hard by to each of them is a small chamber built in the thickness of the wall. It has been suggested that one was a baptistery, the other a vesting-room. In the centre of the inner southern aisle is the tomb of Saint Guy, an oblong mass built up of stone covered by a granite slab rudely carved with a double cross, floriated with vine leaves. The monument is pierced by an aperture neither broad nor high, just large enough for a lean man to crawl through if he felt so inclined, as many did at one time—the edges of the opening are worn away by the countless pilgrims who, in days of yore, thus gratified their devotion. Strange as they seem to us now, practices of this kind were common enough in the Middle Age: when in the eleven hundreds the bodies of the saints were 'elevated' from the crypts in which they had hitherto lain to the temples which about this time were raised above them, and there laid up in gilded shrines, the empty tombs in which they had so long reposed still continued to be the objects of popular devotion. Sometimes the coffin was left open, in order that the saint's clients might stretch their own limbs in the place where his body had lain, sometimes an opening was made in the side of the tomb large enough for a man to peer through, or through which he might even thrust his head. Sometimes it was larger still, and women with sickly children would then place them for a moment within, and pray that God, through His servant's merits, would make the weakling strong. They as firmly believed in the virtue of these sticks and stones as the men of Judæa believed in the virtue of the cloths and handkerchiefs which the Apostles had touched, or of 'the shadow of Peter passing by.'

Of course the present upper church is not the church which the canons of Anderlecht built with Guy's treasure. That was pulled down in 1460, as the Anderlecht archives bear witness. The present structure was commenced then, and not completed until well into the fifteen hundreds. We shall have something to say about it presently.

Nivelles

A little further afield, in the ancient town of Nivelles, there is another and very noteworthy specimen of Romanesque architecture. Nivelles was in former days a far more important place than it is now. It gradually grew up beneath the shelter of the great abbey which, as we have seen, Saint Ita and Saint Gertrude had founded in 625; and if so far as concerns its material welfare it was inferior to the great cities of Brabant, it excelled them all in the dignity of its social standing, for the little town was an ecclesiastical fief held directly from the Emperor27 by an abbess who bore the illustrious title of Lady Princess. To this exalted office no mere plebeian could aspire, nor patrician either for the matter of that, unless she had the right to a scutcheon with at least sixteen quarterings. The abbess lived in almost royal state in a palace adjoining her minster, and the white-robed canons and the Augustinian nuns, who formed the chapter of Nivelles, and dwelt, the former in a cloister hard by the church, the latter, apart in the town, were submitted alike in spiritual and in temporal things to her jurisdiction. Even the lay aristocracy shone with an additional lustre reflected from her magnificence. What rights and privileges they enjoyed above their fellow-citizens were theirs not in virtue of noble birth, but as members of the household of Saint Gertrude. Their fathers were serfs on the abbey domain who had risen to positions of trust, they were men who had bartered their liberty for a servitude freer than freedom itself, had entered a great monastic family and become participators in its immunities, and these their descendants continued to enjoy for years after the days of bondage had ceased. The Hommes de Sainte Gertrude like the Hommes de Saint Pierre owed their title to distinction to the servile condition of their ancestors.

Though the rulers of Brabant had for years past encroached on her privileges whenever they had an opportunity of doing so, the abbess was still a grande dame, with ample means to support her high position when the end came in 1793, but the power which she then wielded, though still considerable, was only the shadow of what it had been in the palmy days when she was not only in name but in fact 'the Lady Princess of Nivelles.'

Nivelles never seems to have attained to anything like commercial pre-eminence. In the days when the fabrication of woollen goods was the staple industry of the Netherlands, her manufacturers perhaps did as well as their fellows in other small towns of like standing, but certainly no better. Later on, when the cloth monopoly was lost and men turned their attention to linen, she did indeed make some reputation for the excellence of her cambric, but she lost it after the riots of 1647, when her weavers migrated in a body to Cambrai and Valenciennes. Henceforth, until its suppression, the custom of the household of Saint Gertrude was the mainstay of her prosperity, and when that source was cut off by the French revolutionists in 1793, she very soon became what she is now, a little market town with a population of some ten or eleven thousand souls.

Nivelles is situated partly on the side of a hill and partly on the fringe of an emerald valley made fertile by the river Senne. Here there are snug homesteads nestling amid orchards and surrounded by well-tilled fields, and rich pasture-lands enclosed with hedges thick and high. There are woods too on the rising ground beyond, and here and there a windmill or the steeple of some village church. The landscape is one most pleasant to behold, and if only the fields were less carefully tilled and the cottages and farm buildings were not so numerous nor so well cared for, it might easily be mistaken for an English scene in one of the home counties.

The little town itself is tranquil, dreamy, clean. In its narrow, winding streets there are some curious old houses with high-pitched roofs and crow-stepped gables, and here and there are some curious old buildings with mullioned windows and Gothic doorways, which one is quite sure, if they are not now the homes of nuns, were at one time, and of course there is a sprinkling of those clean, comfortable-looking, substantial dwellings which are always to be met with in quiet nooks and corners in the country towns of Belgium. Sometimes they have courtyards in front, separated from the street by cunningly wrought iron railings and paved with cobble-stones, on which stand palms in tubs, or bay trees fashioned like umbrellas. Sometimes stretching out behind there is a trimly-kept walled garden of which the passer-by occasionally obtains a refreshing glimpse through some half-open door. They were built for the most part about a hundred and fifty years ago, and are the homes of local professional men or the winter abodes of the neighbouring country gentry, who, reckoning their incomes by hundreds, rather than thousands, are rich enough not only to vegetate comfortably and in a manner befitting their station, but to give alms with no stinted hand, and withal and always to keep very respectable balances at their bankers.

The most interesting feature of the town of Nivelles is, of course, the old Minster, with the exception, perhaps, of Tournai Cathedral, the finest Romanesque church in Belgium. It is a noble pile three hundred and twenty feet long, with three towers at the west end, single nave-aisles, strongly-marked transepts, and an unusually long rectangular choir built over a crypt. Within, however, it is disappointing, for the interior was so completely transformed in the course of the seventeen hundreds that no vestige of the original work was left visible. Efforts are now being made to repair the mischief. The beautiful crypt, which had been completely filled up with earth and rubble, has been excavated and restored, the walls of the choir and transepts have been stripped of the bastard Renaissance ornament with which they were disfigured, the bays which had been bricked up have been opened, a timber roof has been substituted for the plaster ceiling, and it is proposed, as soon as funds are forthcoming, to completely restore the whole church.

The restoration, it is pleasing to note, is being carefully and conscientiously carried out, but though every available fragment is being utilised, so much of the old work has disappeared that, alas, there is no hope of adequately repairing the havoc wrought by the ill-judged generosity of the canons of Nivelles in 1754.

En revanche, save for 'the golden stain of time' and the great tower, a child of the fourteen hundreds, without, the Church of Nivelles remains to-day what it was when Pope Leo consecrated it in 1047 in the presence of his imperial nephew. Not the only association this of Saint Gertrude's Abbey with Leo IX. Its bells, so runs the tale, were solemnly tolled by invisible hands when on the night of the 19th of April 1054 the soul of the great reformer passed out of the world. Whatever may be thought of this beautiful legend, it at least bears witness to Leo's popularity.

So glorious is the exterior of this grand old building, that did the journey from Brussels to Nivelles take as many hours as it does minutes, the sight of it would be ample compensation, and, too, there are cloisters as old as the church itself, in style pure Romanesque, so vast that forest trees flourish in the garth, without making it appear crowded. The south, the east and the west sides have suffered considerably from over-restoration, but the north colonnade is still intact, and built over it is all that remains of the ancient monastery. We have here one of those silent, old-world nooks which are still redolent of the incense of the Middle Age.

The Church of Nivelles is not only interesting on account of its architecture: Pepin of Landen is buried here in the centre of the nave, and beside him his wife, Saint Idenberge, and their daughter Begga, whom the Beguines regard as their patron saint. Here, too, are the mortal remains of another of Pepin's daughters, Saint Gertrude, foundress of the abbey. They are treasured in a shrine of copper gilt, adorned with sculpture and bas-relief, and encrusted with precious stones, a veritable triumph of the goldsmith's craft, designed by Jaquemon, monk of Anchin, and wrought by another Jaquemon, a townsman of Nivelles, with the assistance of one Nicolon, who seems to have been a citizen of Douai. The names of these men are meet to be had in perpetual remembrance.

For the moment this marvellous piece of metal-work is laid up in the sacristy. Presently, when the restoration of the chancel is completed, it will be restored to its former position above the high altar.

Of the remaining fragments of Romanesque architecture in the immediate neighbourhood of Brussels, most remarkable, perhaps, is the great square tower of the Church of Saint Jacques at Louvain, which probably dates from the beginning of the eleven hundreds. Within are some curious cylindrical columns, adorned with floriated capitals of good design and workmanship. The Abbey Church of Parc, hard by the same city, was commenced in 1225, perhaps earlier, but not completed till 1297. This building exists to-day, but it has been so frequently altered by successive abbots that no trace of the original Romanesque work is visible, save a little round-headed doorway alongside the main entrance and some narrow slits of windows in the chancel.

For the rest, in the villages and hamlets, which are so thickly sown in the country round Brussels, there are not a few churches or portions of churches which date from the period we have just been considering. It is impossible, however, within the limits of this handbook to give even a list of them. Those who are interested in this matter will do well to consult Mr. Weale's Belgium. Here will be found descriptions, with numerous historical notes, of the village churches in the neighbourhood of the chief towns of the kingdom and along the main lines. It was published nearly fifty years ago, and of course since then many archæological discoveries have been made, and, alas, much ancient work has disappeared, but no other handbook with which we are acquainted contains in so small a compass such a vast mass of generally reliable information concerning the architecture and the art of the Low Countries.

Gothic architecture seems to have been first introduced into the Netherlands from France by way of Tournai. The stately choir, second to none in Europe, which that great church-builder, Bishop Walter de Marvis, added to his cathedral there during the second quarter of the twelve hundreds, was probably the first purely Gothic structure erected in Belgium. It is altogether French in plan and in method of construction, and it may well have been designed by a mason of the Ile de France. Men's minds were at once captivated by its beauty, and the new style spread rapidly throughout the land.

It could hardly have been otherwise: Tournai was not only the religious capital of Flanders, it was also the artistic capital of a very considerable portion of the Low Country; here was established a school of architects and sculptors, which at this time was among the most famous of the North; when the architects of Tournai adopted the new style it was bound to make headway. Flanders, Holland, Zeeland, without quarries of their own, and without native masons, were constrained to bring from Tournai, the nearest point where stone was to be had, alike their building material and their builders. These men had drawn their inspiration from beyond the Rhine, and perhaps, too, from Normandy, and had already attained in their craft a very high order of excellence. When fascinated, then, by the beauty of Bishop Walter's choir, they determined to follow the new French fashion; they showed themselves no servile imitators, but modified their old plans and their old schemes of ornament in such a manner as to suit the needs of the new methods of construction: thus they gradually evolved a distinct style of their own, and the flat apse, the octagonal towers, the round turrets, adorned with pilasters with capitals delicately carved on either side of the western gable, the high, narrow lancet windows, without mullions or tracery—all distinctive features of Tournai work, are to be met with over and over again, not only in Hainault and in Flanders, but even in Picardy and in Holland.

Less marked was the influence of the Tournai school on the architecture of Brabant. Brabant had quarries of her own, and builders, inferior, indeed, to the builders of Tournai, but for all that well skilled in their craft; and thus what Tournai was doing for the rest of Belgium Brabant was able to do for herself. Though at first her architects seem to have taken as their models the buildings which their rivals of Tournai were constructing in Hainault, in Holland, and in Flanders, even their earliest Gothic work is in no way lacking in originality. Witness, for example, the choir of the Collegiate Church of Saint Gudule at Brussels, one of their first efforts. As time progressed the distinctive features became more and more pronounced, and presently a style was developed more original and also more beautiful than anything produced at the same time by the Tournai school. Indeed, the Gothic architecture of Brabant of the fourteen, fifteen and sixteen hundreds, if it be equalled, is certainly not surpassed by the Gothic architecture of those centuries in any other land. So far as concerns civic buildings, Brabant certainly holds the palm. Neither France nor Germany nor England can show anything which can be compared, for example, to the Town Hall of Brussels or the Town Hall of Louvain, or even with the Gothic portion of the Town Hall of Ghent, which was designed by Brabant architects.

So great was the fame of the architects of Brabant from the commencement of the fourteen hundreds that their services were in request all over the Netherlands, and later on, in the days of the Emperor Charles V., in Germany, in France, and even in far-off Spain; and, strangely enough, some of their latest efforts are as nobly conceived and as carefully executed as in the days when their art was at its zenith.

Nothing could well be finer than the Parish Church of Saint Jacques at Antwerp, which was commenced in 1491 and not completed till 1694, the work having been discontinued from lack of funds in 1530, and not renewed, owing to the religious troubles, until 1602. This grand old building, which was designed for a simple parish church, has all the characteristic features of a great cathedral—triforium, clerestory, double aisles, ambulatory chevet, transepts, and a host of side chapels. The plans were drawn up by Herman De Waghemakere, a burgher of Antwerp, and an architect famous throughout the Low Countries, who not only designed many noble buildings, but begot two sons, Herman and Dominic, to whom he transmitted his talent, and whom he trained to his own calling. When he died, early in the fifteen hundreds, they were able to worthily continue the work at Saint Jacques' which the old man had so successfully commenced, until 1530.

At this time no portion of the church was completed, and the choir was not even begun. When, some seventy years afterwards, building operations were again resumed, the original plans were strictly adhered to, and it is worthy of note that the more recent work is as carefully and skilfully executed as that which was carried out under the eyes of old Herman himself.

This church is rich in stained glass of the fourteen, fifteen and sixteen hundreds, which, considering the period, is of a very high order. If the designs of some of the windows be faulty, the scheme of colour is in each case perfect. It has retained more of its old furniture—tapestry, metal-work, wood-carving and the like, than most churches in Belgium. It contains some good pictures—notably, in the Lady Chapel, an altar-piece by Rubens, which was placed here by his widow, and, in a vault beneath it, all that remains of 'this prince of painters and of gentlemen.'

In the sublime tower of Saint Rombold's at Mechlin we have another late creation, though not so late as the Church of Saint Jacques at Antwerp. The foundation stone was laid on the 1st of May 1452, and they seem to have worked at it intermittently until 1583, when the stones destined to complete it were carried off to Holland by the Prince of Orange, and employed by him to build the town of Willemstad. Even in its unfinished state it is a colossal building. At its base it is fifty-three feet wide without counting the buttresses, which advance on each side to a distance of nearly fifteen feet. Its actual height is over 320 feet, but if the spire had been added, of which the original plans are still in existence, it would have risen to the prodigious height of 544 feet, and would thus have been the loftiest steeple in Europe. This mighty tower was designed by Jan Kelderman, master-mason, of Louvain, not many months, perhaps not many weeks, before his death in 1445; at which time he was in all probability between seventy and eighty years of age. The foundation stone was laid under the direction of his son Andrew, and for over a hundred years one or other of his descendants busied themselves with carrying out the old man's designs.

A remarkable family, the Keldermans: architects, sculptors, painters, almost all of them, during many generations. The first of whom we have any record was Jan van Marsdale, sculptor, of Brussels, who, for some reason of which we are ignorant, adopted the family name by which his descendants are generally known. He was probably born some time during the second quarter of the thirteen hundreds, and died at Brussels not earlier than 1415. In his day he was an artist of renown, but nothing which can be certainly attributed to him has come down to us. We know that he was the author of the richly-sculptured tomb of François van Halen, which was placed in the first apsidal chapel on the south side of Saint Rombold's at Mechlin in 1415, and demolished in 1810.—Of this marvellous work of art there exists in Le Théâtre Sacré du Brabant an engraving—and we know, too, that he was the father of the Jan Kelderman who designed Saint Rombold's tower. This man was a burgher of Louvain, and city architect there from the 7th of October 1439 till his death in 1445. He directed the building of the Council Chamber in the Hôtel de Ville, which had been designed by his predecessor, Plyssis van Vorst, and which still exists. Of his three sons, Rombold, the eldest, was a painter of glass, and one at least of his works has come down to us: a beautiful window in the old church at Lierre, the first on the north side—representing Godefroid Vilain XIV. and his wife, Elizabeth d'Immersule, donors, along with their patrons, Saint Peter and the poor man of Assisi. This window was painted in 1474, and the sum which the artist received for it was forty-two golden florins. Rombold was born in the year 1420. He married before 1447 Catherine van Voshem, whose sister Elizabeth was the wife of the famous painter, Dierick Boudts, and inhabited his own house in the Rue de Diest at Louvain, where he died on the 17th of March 1489. Matthew, Jan's second son, followed his father's trade, and he also busied himself with painting and sculpture: the indentures of an apprentice whom he undertook to instruct, in three years, in the art of painting are still in existence, and we know, too, that some of the carved beams in the Town Hall at Louvain are his work. For the rest, he in due course took to himself a wife, who presently bore him a son, whom he named Hendrick

and trained to his own calling. No record of any work that he executed has as yet been found, but he seems to have done well in his profession, for in 1505 he purchased a house in the Cattle Market at Mechlin, hard by the Chapel of Saint Eloi, and here in 1521 he received Albert Dürer, who in his journal notes that at Mechlin he was the guest of 'Maister Heindrich.'

Andrew, the youngest son of old Jan Kelderman, was a man more famous than either of his brethren. He was city architect of Mechlin, and supervised the carrying out of his father's design of Saint Rombold's tower for thirty years; and when he died, in 1485 or thereabout, it had risen as high as the bell-chamber. He was the author of divers beautiful rood-screens, amongst them that in the church at Bergen-op-Zoom, which he wrought in 1471 with the aid of his son Anthony, who, it will be interesting to note, dwelt in a house at Mechlin which is still standing—No. 13 Aux Tuileries.

This man, succeeding his father, directed the building of Saint Rombold's tower until he in his turn died, on the 15th of October 1512. He was the author of two famous buildings—the Town Hall of Middelburg, in the island of Walcheren, and, in his native city, the Church of Notre-Dame au-delà de la Dyle, and the father of two sons who were not unworthy of the family name, and each of whom set their mark on the family tower. The younger was aptly enough called after the saint with whom the Keldermans had been so long associated; honours were presently his, and wealth and a wide reputation, if he were not the greatest of his race, at least he was the most successful, of Rombold Kelderman II. we shall have much to say later on; the elder was named, after his father, Anthony, and though he died young, he lived long enough, but only just long enough, to design a monument which still

proclaims his genius—the old Broodhuis at Brussels, now called La Maison du Roi. Some three days before the foundation stone was laid young Anthony was gathered to his fathers (December 5, 1515), and the guerdon which he would have received was paid into the hands of his widow.

There were other members of this talented family of whom the record of some of their labours has come down to us. Notably Matthew, a younger son of Andrew Kelderman, who worked at Antwerp Cathedral under Herman De Waghemakere from 1487 to 1498; his son, also Matthew, who migrated to Louvain, was named city mason there and directed the building operations of the Church of Saint Peter from 1503 to 1527; and Laurence, who plied his trade, for the most part in Brussels, helped to build the Maison du Roi, and was perhaps a nephew, perhaps a son, of the great architect who planned it. The city records from which these bald facts have been culled in comparatively recent years by those who have or have had the care of them, divulge something of the nature of an anecdote concerning Laurence Kelderman. We learn from certain entries in the town accounts of Brussels that in the year 1513 he was mulcted 30 florins for wounding one of the amman's serjeants, and the same document informs us too how it came about.

Kelderman and two other famous masons—Hendrick van Pede, the author of the Town Hall of Oudenaarde, and Ludwig van Beughem, who later on built for Marguerite of Austria the famous Church of Brow in Bresse—were at this time at work, most fortunately for them as it afterwards turned out, on the beautiful palace which the Count of Nassau was erecting for himself in Brussels with that gold, as all men believed, which he had wrung from the vanquished burghers of Bruges in 1490, and every evening it was their wont, when their work was done, to drink together at the Sign of the Star, a tavern of note in the Great Market, which seems to have been at this time much frequented by men of their craft. To this house of entertainment, then, on the 13th of February, at their accustomed hour they repaired, and each man having bade the drawer bring the liquor he liked best, they proceeded to pledge one another in bumpers, but their potations that night were not destined to be of long duration. Perhaps there was strife in the cups of some of their boon companions, certain it is that one of them drew his knife, and, as luck would have it, at the same moment the amman's serjeant walked in, who, fearing mischief or feigning to do so, forthwith disarmed the fellow; whereat our masons, enraged at this insult to a free citizen, hurled themselves on the officer of justice, wrenched away his sword, and in so doing inflicted on him a flesh wound. The offence, according to the strict code of Brussels, was no light one, and serious consequences would have undoubtedly followed had it not been for the Count of Nassau, who, loth to lose the services of such capable workmen, exerted his influence in their behalf, and thus they were quit with a fine. Later on we find the names of two of the delinquents again associated, but in very different fashion. When it was decided in 1532 to add to the Church of Saint Gudila a new Sacrament chapel, the Maîtres de la Fabrique commissioned three architects to prepare plans for the proposed structure, and two of them were our friends of the tavern brawl, Hendrick van Pede and Ludwig van Beughem. Peter van Wyenhoven was the third competitor, his designs were adjudged the best, and he it was who constructed the actual building. Bernard van Orley, the famous painter, made the fair copy of his plans for him on two large sheets of parchment, and received for so doing, it will be interesting to note, £2, 10s. 9d., and the foundation stone was laid on the 8th of February 1535.