n Adultery," the "Adoration of the Magi," the "Interceder
Interceded" (the Virgin, at the prayer of St. Francis d'Assisi,
restrains the angry Saviour from destroying a wicked world), and the
"Martyrdom of St. Livinius." This last, however--like the "Crucifixion"
in the Antwerp Gallery; like Van Dyck's picture in this collection of
the drunken Silenus supported by a fawn; and like Rubens' own
disgusting Silenus in our National Gallery at home--illustrates
unpleasantly the painful Flemish facility to condescend to details, or
even whole conceptions, the realism of which is unnecessarily
deliberate and coarse. Here, in this death of St. Livinius, the
executioner is shown in the act of presenting to a dog with pincers the
bleeding tongue that he has just cut out of the mouth of the dying
priest.

Brussels itself, as already intimated, is an exceedingly pleasant city
for a more or less prolonged stay; and, owing at once to the admirable
system of "Rundreise" tickets that are issued by the State railways at
an uncommonly low price, to the rather dubious quality of the hotels in
some of the smaller towns, and to the cardinal fact that Brussels is a
centre from which most of the other great cities of Belgium--Malines,
Ghent, Antwerp, and Liege, not to mention smaller towns of absorbing
interest, such as Mons, Namur, Hal, Tirlemont, Leau, and Soignies--may
be easily visited, more or less completely, in the course of a single
day--owing to all these facts many people will be glad to make this
pleasant city their centre, or headquarters, for the leisurely
exploration of most of Belgium, with the exception of the more distant
and out-of-the-way districts of West Flanders and the Ardennes. All the
places enumerated are thoroughly worth visiting, but obviously only the
more important can be dealt with more than just casually here. Mons, on
a hill overlooking the great coalfield of the Borinage, with its
strange pyramidal spoil-heaps, is itself curiously free from the dirt
and squalor of an English colliery town; and equally worth visiting for
the sake of its splendid cathedral of St. Wandru, the richly
polychromatic effect of whose interior, due to the conjunction of deep
red-brick vaulting with the dark blue of its limestone capitals and
piers, illustrates another pleasant phase of Belgian ecclesiastical
architecture, as well as for the sake of a contest, almost of
yesterday, that has added new and immortal laurels to the genius of