rricane in 1604.

IV.

One has left oneself all too little space to say what ought to be said
of the Belgian Ardennes. Personally I find them a trifle disappointing;
they come, no doubt, as a welcome relief after the rest of Belgian
landscape, which I have heard described, not altogether unjustly, as
the ugliest in the world; but the true glory and value of Belgium will
always be discovered in its marvellously picturesque old towns, and in
its unrivalled wealth of painting, brass-work, and wood-carving.
Compared with these last splendours the low, wooded wolds of the
Ardennes, with their narrow limestone valleys, seem a little thing
indeed. Dinant, no doubt, and Rochefort would be pleasant places enough
if one were not always harking back in memory to Malines and Ypres, or
longing to be once more in Ghent or Bruges.

The traveller by railway between Brussels and Liege passes, soon after
leaving the station of Ans, a point of great significance in the study
of Belgian landscape. Hitherto from Brussels, or for that matter from
Bruges and Ostend, the country, though studded at frequent intervals
with cities and big towns, has been curiously and intensely rural in
the tracts that lie between; but now, as we descend the steep incline
into the valley of the Meuse, we enter on a scene of industrial
activity which, if never quite as bad as our own Black Country at home,
is sufficiently spoilt and irritating to all who love rustic grace. The
redeeming point, as always, is that infinitely superior good taste
which presents us, in the midst of coal-mines and desolation, not with
our own unspeakably squalid Sheffields or Rotherhams, but with a
queenly city, with broad and handsome streets, with a wealth of public
gardens, and with many stately remnants of the Renaissance and Middle
Time. It is possible in Liege to forget--or rather impossible to
recall--the soiled and grimy country that stretches from its gates in
the direction of Seraing. Even under the sway of the Spanish tyranny
this was an independent state under the rule of a Bishop Prince, who
was also an Elector of the Holy Roman Empire. Its original cathedral,
indeed, has vanished, like those at Cambrai and Bruges, in the
insensate throes of the French Revolution; and the existing church of
St. Paul, though dating in part from the thirteenth century, and a fine
enough building in its way, is hardly the kind of structure that one
would wish to associate with the s