It needs, indeed, an effort of the imagination at the moment of writing to think of Belgium as in any sense a component part of "Beautiful Europe." The unhappy "cockpit" of the Continent at the actual hour is again in process of accomplishing its frightful destiny—no treaty, or "scrap of paper," is potent to preserve this last, and weakest, of all the nations of Western Europe from drinking to the dregs the cup of ruin and desolation. Tragic indeed in the profoundest sense—in the sense of Aristo

It is not merely in its quality of unredeemed and absolute flatness that the great fen country of Flanders is so strongly reminiscent of the great fen country of the Holland parts of Lincolnshire. Each of these vast levels is equally distinguished by the splendour and conspicuousness of its ancient churches. Travelling by railway between Nieuport and Dixmude, you have on every side of you, if the day be clear, a prospect of innumerable towers and spires, just as you have if you travel by railway

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, a

One has left oneself all too little space to say what ought to be said of the Belgian Ardennes. Personally I find them a trifle disappointing; they come, no doubt, as a welcome relief after the rest of Belgian landscape, which I have heard described, not altogether unjustly, as the ugliest in the world; but the true glory and value of Belgium will always be discovered in its marvellously picturesque old towns, and in its unrivalled wealth of painting, brass-work, and wood-carving. Compared with