th-century Corporation Houses of the various
ancient city guilds--Le Renard, the house of the silk-mercers and
haberdashers; Maison Cornet, the house of the boatmen, or "batelliers";
La Louvre, the house of the archers; La Brouette, the house of the
carpenters; Le Sac, the house of the printers and booksellers; the
Cygne, the house of the butchers; and other houses that need not be
specified at any greater length, of the tailors, painters, and
brewers--this is probably the completest and most splendid example of
an ancient city market-square that now remains in Europe, and
absolutely without rival even in Belgium itself, though similar old
guild-houses, in the same delightful Flemish fashion, may still be
found (though in this case with admixture of many modern buildings) in
the Grande Place at Antwerp. It was in this splendid square at Brussels
that the unhappy Counts of Egmont and Horn were brutally done to death,
to glut the sinister tyranny of Spanish Philip, on June 5, 1568.

Also, in addition to these two superlative antiquities, two modern
buildings in Brussels, though for widely different reasons, can hardly
be passed over under plea of lack of space. Crowning the highest point
of the city, and towering itself towards heaven in a stupendous pile of
masonry, is the enormous new Palais de Justice, probably the most
imposing law courts in the world. English Law undoubtedly is housed
with much greater modesty, though not without due magnificence, in the
altogether humbler levels of the Strand. Also in the High Town--which
is the modern quarter of Brussels, in contrast with the mediaeval Low
Town, which lies in the flat below--is the Royal Museum of Ancient
Paintings, which probably divides honours with the Picture Gallery at
Antwerp as the finest and most representative collection of pictures of
the Netherlandish school in the world. Here you may revel by the hour
in a candlelight effect by Gerard Dow; in the poultry of Melchior
d'Hondecoeter; in a pigsty of Paul Potter's; in landscapes by Meindert
Hobbema; in a moonlight landscape of Van der Neer's; in a village scene
by Jan Steen; in the gallant world of Teniers; and in the weird
imaginings of Pieter Brueghel the younger. The greatest pictures in the
whole collection, I suppose, are those by Rubens, though he has nothing
here that is comparable for a moment with those in the Picture Gallery
and Cathedral at Antwerp. Very magnificent, however, is the "Woman
taken i