British battle. Tournai, on the upper Scheldt, or Escaut, is remarkable
for the heavy Romanesque nave of its cathedral, which is built of the
famous local black marble, as well as for its remarkable central
cluster of five great towers. Soignies (in Flemish Zirick), roughly
half-way between Mons and Brussels, and probably little visited, has a
sombre old abbey church, of St. Vincent Maldegaire, that was built in
the twelfth century, and that is enriched inside with such a collection
of splendidly carved classical woodwork--stalls, misericordes, and
pulpit--as you will scarcely find elsewhere even in Belgium. The pulpit
in particular is wonderful, with its life-sized girl supporters, with
their graceful and lightly poised figures, and pure and lovely faces.
Namur, strangely enough, has really nothing of antiquity outside the
doors of its Archaeological Museum, but is worth a visit if only for
the pleasure of promenading streets which, if almost wholly modern, are
unusually clean and bright. Tirlemont, again, has two old churches that
will not delay you long, though Notre Dame de Lac has remarkably fine
confessionals of the dawn of the seventeenth century, and though the
splendid brass-work of the font and baptistery lectern at St. Germains
would alone be worth a visit; but Leau, for which Tirlemont is the
junction, is so quaint and curious a little town, and comes so much in
the guise of a pleasant discovery--since Baedeker barely mentions
it--that, even apart from its perfect wealth of wood and brass work in
the fine thirteenth-century church of St. Leonhard, it might anyhow be
thought to justify a visit to this little visited corner of South
Brabant. I do not know that the brass-work could be easily matched
elsewhere: the huge standard candelabrum to the north of the altar,
with its crowning Crucifixion; the lectern, with its triumphant eagle
and prostrate dragon; the font, with its cover, and the holy-water
stoup almost as big as a small font (in Brittany I have seen them as
big as a bath); and the beautiful brass railings that surround the
splendid Tabernacle that was executed in 1552 by Cornelius de Vriendt,
the brother of the painter Frans Floris, and that towers high into the
vaulting to a height of fifty-two feet. One realizes more completely in
a quiet village church like this the breadth and intensity of the wave
of artistic impulse that swept through the Lowlands in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries than