r no reason in the world save to
extort a verger's fee for their exhibition, are the splendid black
marble monuments, with recumbent figures in copper gilt, of Charles the
Bold, who fell at Nancy in 1477 (but lives for ever, with Louis XI. of
France, in the pages of "Quentin Durward"), and of his daughter, Mary,
the wife of the Emperor Maximilian, of Austria, who was killed by being
thrown from her horse whilst hunting in 1482. These two tombs are of
capital interest to those who are students of Belgian history, for
Charles the Bold was the last male of the House of Burgundy, and it was
by the marriage of his daughter that the Netherlands passed to the
House of Hapsburg, and thus ultimately fell under the flail of
religious persecution during the rule of her grandson, Spanish Philip.
Close to Notre Dame, in the Rue St. Catherine, is the famous old
Hospital of St. Jean, the red-brick walls of which rise sleepily from
the dull waters of the canal, just as Queens' College, or St. John's,
at Cambridge, rise from the sluggish Cam. Here is preserved the rich
shrine, or chasse, "resembling a large Noah's ark," of St. Ursula, the
sides of which are painted with scenes from the virgin's life by Hans
Memling, who, though born in the neighbourhood of Mayence, and thus
really by birth a German, lived for nearly a quarter of a century or
more of his life in Bruges, and is emphatically connected, like his
master Roger van der Weyden and the brothers Van Eyck, with the
charming early Flemish school. There is a story that he was wounded
under Charles le Temeraire on the stricken field of Nancy, and painted
these gemlike pictures in return for the care and nursing that he
received in the Hospital of St. Jean, but "this story," says Professor
Anton Springer, "may be placed in the same category as those of Durer's
malevolent spouse, and of the licentiousness of the later Dutch
painters." These scenes from the life of St. Ursula are hardly less
delightfully quaint than the somewhat similar series that was painted
by Carpaccio for the scuola of the Saint at Venice, and that are now
preserved in the Accademia. Early Flemish painting, in fact, in
addition to its own peculiar charm of microscopic delicacy of finish,
is hardly inferior, in contrast with the later strong realism and
occasional coarseness of Rubens or Rembrandt, to the tender poetic
dreaminess of the primitive Italians. Certainly these pictures, though
finished to the minutest and