the parcelling out of their territory,
the Flemings became a people homogeneous through their pipes and
beer.[*]

[*] Flanders was parcelled into three divisions; of which Eastern
Flanders, capital Ghent, and Western Flanders, capital Bruges, are
two provinces of Belgium. French Flanders, capital Lille, is the
Departement du Nord of France. Douai, about twenty miles from
Lille, is the chief town of the arrondissement du Nord.

After assimilating, by constant sober regulation of conduct, the
products and the ideas of its masters and its neighbors, this country of
Flanders, by nature so tame and devoid of poetry, worked out for itself
an original existence, with characteristic manners and customs which
bear no signs of servile imitation. Art stripped off its ideality and
produced form alone. We may seek in vain for plastic grace, the swing of
comedy, dramatic action, musical genius, or the bold flight of ode and
epic. On the other hand, the people are fertile in discoveries, and
trained to scientific discussions which demand time and the midnight
oil. All things bear the ear-mark of temporal enjoyment. There men look
exclusively to the thing that is: their thoughts are so scrupulously
bent on supplying the wants of this life that they have never risen, in
any direction, above the level of this present earth. The sole idea
they have ever conceived of the future is that of a thrifty, prosaic
statecraft: their revolutionary vigor came from a domestic desire to
live as they liked, with their elbows on the table, and to take their
ease under the projecting roofs of their own porches.

The consciousness of well-being and the spirit of independence which
comes of prosperity begot in Flanders, sooner than elsewhere, that
craving for liberty which, later, permeated all Europe. Thus the
compactness of their ideas, and the tenacity which education grafted
on their nature made the Flemish people a formidable body of men in
the defence of their rights. Among them nothing is half-done,--neither
houses, furniture, dikes, husbandry, nor revolutions; and they hold a
monopoly of all that they undertake. The manufacture of linen, and that
of lace, a work of patient agriculture and still more patient industry,
are hereditary like their family fortunes. If we were asked to show in
human form the purest specimen of solid stability, we could do no better
than point to a portrait of some old burgomaster, capable, as was
pr