iaeval from end to end. This, of course, is not true of Belgian
Luxembourg and the region of the Ardennes, where the population is much
more sparse; where we do not stumble, about every fifteen miles or so,
on some big town of historic name; and where the endless chessboard of
little fields that lies, for example, between Ghent and Oudenarde, or
between Malines and Louvain, is replaced by long contours of sweeping
limestone wold, often covered with rolling wood.

Ypres is distinguished above all cities in Belgium by the huge size and
stately magnificence of its lordly Cloth Hall, or Halles des Drapiers.
So vast, indeed, is this huge building, and so flat the surrounding
plain, that it is said that it is possible from the strangely isolated
hill of Cassel, which lies about eighteen miles away to the west, just
over the border, in France, on a really clear day--I have only climbed
it myself, unluckily, in a fog of winter mist--to distinguish in a
single view, by merely turning the head, the clustering spires of Laon,
the white chalk cliffs of Kent, and this vast pile of building, like a
ship at sea, that seems to lie at anchor in the heart of the "sounding
plain." Nothing, perhaps, in Europe is so strangely significant of
vanished greatness--not even Rome, with its shattered Forum, or Venice,
with a hundred marble palaces--as this huge fourteenth-century
building, with a facade that is four hundred and thirty-six feet long,
and with its lofty central tower, that was built for the pride and need
of Ypres, and as a market for the barter of its priceless linens, at a
time when Ypres numbered a population of two hundred thousand souls
(almost as big as Leicester at the present day), and was noisy with
four thousand busy looms; whereas now it has but a beggarly total of
less than seventeen thousand souls (about as big as Guildford), and is
only a degree less sleepy than Malines or Bruges-la-Morte. Ypres,
again, like Arras, has lent its name to commerce, if diaper be really
rightly derived from the expression "linen of Ypres." The Cloth Hall
fronts on to the Grande Place, and, indeed, forms virtually one side of
it; and behind, in the Petite Place, is the former cathedral of St.
Martin. This is another fine building, though utterly eclipsed by its
huge secular rival, that was commenced in the thirteenth century, and
is typically Belgian, as opposed to French, in the character of its
architecture, and not least in its possession