society for which Antwerp was famed in the
seventeenth century--the Antwerp of Rubens (though not a native) and
Van Dyck, of Jordaens, of the two Teniers, of Grayer, Zegers, and
Snyders. Printing, indeed, in those days was itself a fine art, and the
glories of the house of Plantin-Moretus rivalled those of the later
Chiswick Press, and of the goodly Chaucers edited in our own time by
Professor Skeat, and printed by William Morris. Proof-reading was then
an erudite profession, and Francois Ravelingen, who entered Plantin's
office as proof-reader in 1564, and assisted Arias Montanus in revising
the sheets of the Polyglot Bible, is said to have been a great Greek
and Oriental scholar, and crowned a career of honourable toil, like
Hogarth's Industrious Apprentice, by marrying his master's eldest
daughter, Marguerite, in 1565. The room in which these scholars worked
remains much in its old condition, with the table at which they sat,
and some of their portraits on the wall. Everything here, in short, is
interesting: the press-room, which was used almost continuously and
practically without change--two of the antiquated presses of Plantin's
own time remain--for nearly three centuries; the Great and Little
Libraries, with their splendid collection of books; the archive room,
with its long series of business accounts and ledgers; the private
livingrooms of the Moretus family; and last, but not least, the modest
little shop, where books still repose upon the shelves, which looks as
though the salesman might return at any moment to his place behind the
counter. England has certainly nothing like it, though London had till
recently in Crosby Hall a great merchant's house of the fifteenth
century, though stripped of all internal fittings and propriety.
Luckily this last has been re-erected at Chelsea, though robbed by the
change of site of half its authenticity and value.

I have chosen to dwell on this strange museum at length that seems
disproportionate, not merely because of its unique character, but
because it seems to me full of lessons and reproach for an age that has
subordinated honest workmanship to cheap and shoddy productiveness, and
has sacrificed the workman to machinery. Certainly no one who visits
Antwerp can afford to overlook it; but probably most people will first
bend their steps towards the more popular shrine of the great
cathedral. Here I confess myself utter heretic: to call this church, as
I have seen it ca