ctions at Brussels
and Amsterdam; and gladly would one visit the great fifteenth and
sixteenth century churches of St. Jacques, St. Andre, and St. Paul,
which not merely form together architecturally an important group of a
strongly localized character, but are also, like the cathedral,
veritable museums or picture galleries. It is necessary, however, to
conclude this section, to say a few words about Louvain, which, lying
as it does on the main route from Brussels to Liege, may naturally be
considered on our way to the northern Ardennes.

Louvain, on the whole, has been much more modernized than other Belgian
cities of corresponding bulk, such as Bruges or Malines. The road from
the railway-station to the centre of the town is commonplace indeed in
its lack of picturesque Flemish house-fronts or stepped, "corbie,"
Flemish gables. Louvain, in fact, unlike the two "dead" cities of West
Flanders and Brabant, wears a briskly business-like aspect, and pulses
with modern life. I suppose that I ought properly to have written all
this in the past tense, for Louvain is now a heap of smoking cinders.
The famous Town Hall has, indeed, so far been spared by ruffians who
would better have spared the magnificent Cloth Hall at Ypres; between
these two great buildings, the products respectively of the Belgian
genius of the fifteenth and thirteenth centuries, "culture" could
hardly hesitate. The Hotel-de-Ville at Louvain is, indeed, an
astonishing structure, just as the cathedral at Antwerp is astonishing;
but one has to be very indulgent, or very forgetful of better models,
not to deprecate this absolutely wanton riot of overladened panelling
and bulging, top-heavy pinnacles. The expiring throes of Belgian Gothic
were a thousand degrees less chaste than the classicism of the early
Renaissance: few, perhaps, will prefer the lacelike over-richness of
this midfifteenth century town hall at Louvain to the restraint of the
charming sixteenth-century facade of the Hotel de Ville at Leiden.
Opposite the town hall is the huge fifteenth-century church of St.
Pierre, the interior of which, still smothered in whitewash in 1910,
was remarkable for its florid Gothic rood-screen and soaring
Tabernacle, or Ciborium. The stumpy fragment of tower at the west end
is said once to have been five hundred and thirty feet high! It is not
surprising to read that this last, and crowning, manifestation of a
familiar Belgian weakness was largely wrecked by a hu