washed place of worship, supported | paid; and presently the old ladies, rising from their chairs one by one, came in face of the altar, where they knelt down and said a short prayer; then, rising, unpinned their veils, and folded them up all exactly in the same folds and fashion, and laid them square like napkins on their heads, and tucked up their long black outer dresses, and trudged off to their con by half a dozen columns on either The service commenced as the clock finished striking seven the organ pealed out, a very cracked and old one, and presently some weak old voice from the choir overhead quavered out a canticle; which done, a thin old voice of a priest at the altar far off (and which had now become quite gloomy in the sunset) chanted feebly another part of the service; then the nuns warbled once more overhead; and it was curious to hear, in the intervals of the most lugubrious chants, how the organ went off with some extremely cheerful military or profane air. At one time was a march, at another a quick tunc; which ceasing, the old nuns began again, and so sung until the service, was ended. In the midst of it one of the whiteveiled sisters approached us with a very mysterious air, and put down her white veil close to our ears, and whispered. Were we doing any thing wrong, I wondered? Were they come to that part of the service where heretics and infidels ought to quit the church? What have you to ask, O sacred, white-veiled maid? All she said was, "Deux centièmes pour les suisses," which sum was The novices wear black veils, under one of which I saw a young, sad, handsome face; it was the only thing in the establishment that was the least romantic or gloomy and, for the sake of any reader of a sentimental turn, let us hope that the poor soul has been crossed in love, and that over some soul-stirring tragedy that black curtain has fallen. Ghent has, I believe, been called a vulgar Venice. It contains dirty canals and old houses that must satisfy the most eager antiquary, though the buildings are not quite in so good preservation as others that may be seen in the Netherlands. The commercial bustle of the place seems considerable, and it contains more beer-shops than any city I ever saw. These beer-shops seem the only amusement of the inhabitants, until at least, the theatre shall be built, of which the elevation is now complete, a very handsome and extensive pile. There are beer-shops in the cellars of the houses, which are frequented, it is to be presumed, by the lower sort; there are beer-shops at the barriers, where the citizens and their families repair; and beer-shops in the town, glaring with gas, with long_gauze blinds, however, to hide what I hear is a rather questionable reputation. Our inn," The Hotel of the Post," a spacious and comfortable residence, is on a little place planted round with trees, and that seems to be the Palais Royal of the town. Three clubs, which look from without to be very comfortable, ornament this square with their gas-lamps. Here stands, too, the theatre that is to be; there is a café, and on evenings a military band plays the very worst music I ever remember to have heard. I went out to-night to take a quiet walk upon this place, and the horrid brazen discord of these trumpeters set me half mad. I went to the café for refuge, passing on my way a subterraneous beershop, where men and women were drinking to the sweet music of a cracked barrel-organ. They take in a couple of French papers at this café, and the same number of Belgian journals. You may imagine how well the latter are informed, when you hear that the battle of Boulogne, fought by the immortal Louis Napoleon, was not known here until some gentlemen out of Norfolk brought the news from London, and until it had travelled to Paris, and from Paris to Brussels. For a whole hour I could not get a newspaper at the café. The horrible brass band in the mean time had quitted the place, and now, to amuse the Ghent citizens, a couple of little boys came to the café, and set up a small concert one played ill on the guitar, but sang, very sweetly, plaintive French ballads; the other was the comic singer; he carried about with him a queer, long, damp looking mouldy white hat, with no brim. " Ecoutez,' said the waiter to me, "il va faire l'Anglais; c'est très drôle !" The little rogue mounted his immense brimless hat, and, thrusting his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat, began to faire l'Anglais, with a song in which swearing was the principal joke. We all laughed at this, and indeed the little rascal seemed to have a good deal of humor. How they hate us, these foreigners, in Belgium as much as in France! What lies they tell of us; how gladly they would see us humiliated! Honest folks at home over their port-wine say, "Ay, ay, and very good reason they have too. National vanity, sir, wounded we have beaten them so often." My dear sir, there is not a greater error in the world than this. They hate you because you are stupid, hard to please, and intolerably insolent and air-giving. I walked with an Englishman yesterday, who asked the way to a street of which he pronounced the name very badly to a little Flemish boy: the Flemish boy did not answer; and there was my Englishman quite in a rage, shrieking in the child's ear as if he must answer. He seemed to think that it was the duty of" the snob," as he called him, to obey the gentleman. This is why we are hated-for pride. In our free country a tradesman, a lackey, or a waiter will submit to almost any given insult from a gentleman: in these benighted lands one man is as good as another; and pray God it may soon be so with us! Of all European people, which is the nation that has the most haughtiness, the strongest prejudices, the greatest reserve, the greatest dulness? I say an Englishman of the genteel classes. An honest groom jokes and hobs-andnobs, and makes his way with the kitchen-maids, for there is good social nature in the man; his master dare not unbend. Look at him, how he scowls at you on your entering an innroom; think how you scowl yourself to meet his scowl. To-day, as we were walking and staring about the place, a worthy old gentleman in a carriage, seeing a pair of strangers, took off his hat and bowed very gravely with his old powdered head out of the window: I am sorry to say that our first impulse was to burst out laughing-it seemed so supremely ridiculous that a stranger should notice and welcome another. As for the notion that foreigners hate us because we have beaten them so often, my dear sir, this is the greatest error in the world well-educated Frenchmen do not believe that we have beaten them. A man was once ready to call me out in Paris because I said that we had beaten the French in Spain ; and here before me is a French paper, with a London correspondent discoursing about Louis Bonaparte and his jackass expedition to Bou- | town was especially disagreeable to me, logne. "He was received at Eglintoun, it is true," says the correspondent, "but what do you think was the reason? Because the English nobility were anxious to revenge upon his person (with some coups de lance) the checks which the grand homme' his uncle had inflicted on us in Spain." and have only just hit on the reason why. Sweetest Juliana, you will never guess it: it is simply this, that I have not seen a single decent-looking woman in the whole place; they look all ugly, with coarse mouths, vulgar figures, mean mercantile faces; and so the traveller walking among them finds the pleasure of his walk excessively damped, and the impressions made upon him disagreeable. In the Academy there are no pictures of merit; but sometimes a second-rate picture is as pleasing as the best, and one may pass an hour here very pleasantly. There is a room ap This opinion is so general among the French, that they would laugh at you with scornful incredulity if you ventured to assert any other. Foy's history of the Spanish War does not, unluckily, go far enough. I have read a French history which hardly mentions the war in Spain, and calls the battle of Salamanca a French vic-propriated to Belgian artists, of which tory. You know how the other day, and in the teeth of all evidence, the French swore to their victory of Toulouse and so it is with the rest; and you may set it down as pretty certain, 1st, That only a few people know the real state of things in France, as to the matter in dispute between us; 2d, That those who do, keep the truth to themselves, and so it is as if it had never been. These Belgians have caught up, and quite naturally, the French tone. We are perfide Albion with them still. Here is the Ghent paper, which declares that it is beyond a doubt that Louis Napoleon was sent by the English and Lord Palmerston; and though it states in another part of the journal (from English authority) that the Prince had never seen Lord Palmerston, yet the lie will remain uppermost the people and the editor will believe it to the end of time. See to what a digression yonder little fellow in the tall hat has given rise! Let us make his picture, and have done with him. I could not understand, in my walks about this place, which is certainly picturesque enough, and contains extraordinary charms in the shape of old gables, quaint spires, and broad shining canals- I could not at first comprehend why, for all this, the I never saw the like: they are, like all the rest of the things in this country, miserable imitations of the French school - great nude Venuses, and Junos à la David, with the drawing left out. BRUGES. The change from vulgar Ghent, with its ugly women and coarse bustle, to this quiet, old, half-deserted, cleanly Bruges, was very pleasant. I have seen old men at Versailles, with shabby coats and pigtails, sunning themselves on the benches in the walls; they had seen better days, to be sure, but they were gentlemen still: and so we found, this morning, old dowager Bruges basking in the pleasant August sun, and looking if not prosperous, at least cheerful and wellbred. It is the quaintest and prettiest of all the quaint and pretty towns I have seen. A painter might spend months here, and wander from church to church, and admire old towers and pinnacles, tall gables, bright canals, and pretty little patches of green garden and moss-grown wall, that reflect in the clear quiet water. Before the inn-window is a garden, from which in the early morning issues a most wonderful odor of stocks and wallflowers; next comes a road with trees of admirable green; numbers of little children are playing in this road (the place is so clean that they may roll in it all day without soiling their pinafores), and on the other side of the trees are little old-fashioned, dumpy, whitewashed, red-tiled houses. A poorer landscape to draw never was known, nor a pleasanter to see - -the children especially, who are inordinately fat and rosy. Let it be remembered, too, that here we are out of the country of ugly women: the expression of the face is almost uniformly gentle and pleasing, and the figures of the women, wrapped in long black, monk-like cloaks and hoods, very picturesque. No wonder there are so many children: "The Guide-book" (omniscient Mr. Murray!) says there are fifteen thousand paupers in the town, and we know how such multiply. How the deuce do their children look so fat and rosy? By eating dirt-pies, I suppose. I saw a couple making a very nice savory one, and another employed in gravely sticking strips of stick betwixt the pebbles at the house-door, and so making for herself a stately garden. The men and women don't seem to have much more to do. There are a couple of tall chimneys at either suburb of the town, where no doubt manufactories are at work, but within the walls everybody seems decently idle. We have been, of course, abroad to visit the lions. The tower in the Grand Place is very fine, and the bricks of which it is built do not yield a whit in color to the best stone. The great building round this tower is very like the pictures of the Ducal Palace at Venice; and there is a long market area, with columns down the middle, from which hung shreds of rather lean-looking meat, that would do wonders under the hands of Cattermole or Haghe. In the tower there is a chime of hells that keep ringing perpetually. They not only play tunes of themselves, and every quarter of an hour, but an individual performs selections from popular operas on them at certain periods of the morning, afternoon, and evening. I have heard to-day "Suoni la Tromba," "Son Vergin Vezzosa," from "The Puritani," and other airs, and very badly they were played too; for such a great monster as a tower-bell cannot be expected to imitate Madame Grisi or even Signor Lablache. Other churches indulge in the same amusement, so that one may come here and live in melody all day or night, like the young woman in Moore's "Lalla Rookh." In the matter of art, the chief attractions of Bruges are the pictures of Hemling, that are to be seen in the churches, the hospital, and the picture-gallery of the place. There are no more pictures of Rubens to be seen, and, indeed, in the course of a fortnight, one has had quite enough of the great man and his magnificent, swaggering canvases. What a difference is here with simple Hemling and the extraordinary creations of his pencil! The hospital is particularly rich in them; and the legend there is that the painter, who had served Charles the Bold in his war against the Swiss, and his last battle and defeat, wandered back wounded and penniless to Bruges, and here found cure and shelter. This hospital is a noble and curious sight. The great hall is almost as it was in the twelfth century; it is spanned by Saxon arches, and lighted by a multiplicity of Gothic windows of all sizes; it is very lofty, clean, and perfectly well ventilated; a screen runs across the middle of the room, to divide the male from the female patients, and we were taken to examine each ward, where the poor people seemed happier than possibly they would have been in health and starvation without it. Great yellow blankets were on the iron beds, the linen was scrupulously clean, glittering pewter-jugs and goblets stood by the side of each patient, and they were provided with godly books (to judge from the binding), in which several were reading at leisure. Honest old comfortable nuns, in queer CC filling the little chapel with smoke. The music pealed with wonderful sweetness; you could see the prim white heads of the nuns in their gal lery. The evening light streamed down upon old statues of saints and carved brown stalls, and lighted up the head of the golden-haired Magdalen in a picture of the entombment of Christ. Over the gallery, and, as it were, a kind protectress to the poor below, stood the statue of the Virgin. III.-WATERLOO. dresses of blue, black, white, and | plices serving him, holding his robe flannel, were bustling through the as he rose and bowed, and the moneyroom, attending to the wants of the gatherer swinging his censer, and sick. I saw about a dozen of these kind women's faces; one was young all were healthy and cheerful. One came with bare blue arms and a great pile of linen from an out-house- such a grange as Cedric the Saxon might have given to a guest for the night. A couple were in a laboratory, a tall, bright, clean room, 500 years old at least. "We saw you were not very religious," said one of the old ladies, with a red, wrinkled, good-humored face, "by your behavior yesterday in chapel." And yet we did not laugh and talk as we used at college, but were profoundly affected by the scene that we saw there. It was a fête-day a mass of Mozart was sung in the evening-not well sung, and yet so exquisitely tender and melodious, that it brought tears into our eyes. There were not above twenty people in the church: all, save three or four, were women in long black cloaks. I took them for nuns at first. They were, however, the common people of the town, very poor indeed, doubtless, for the priest's box that I ask any gentleman who reads was brought round was not added to this the letters to my Juliana being by most of them, and their contribu- written with an eye to publication tions were but two-cent pieces, five to remember especially how many of these go to a penny; but we know times, how many hundred times, how the value of such, and can tell the many thousand times, in his hearing, exact worth of a poor woman's mite! the battle of Waterloo has been disThe box-bearer did not seem at first cussed after dinner, and to call to willing to accept our donation - we mind how cruelly he has been bored were strangers and heretics; however, by the discussion. "Ah, it was lucky I held out my hand, and he came per- for us that the Prussians came up! force as it were. Indeed it had only says one little gentleman, looking a franc in it but que voulez-vous? I particularly wise and ominous. had been drinking a bottle of Rhine" Hang the Prussians!" (or, perhaps, wine that day, and how was I to afford more ? The Rhine wine is dear in this country, and costs four francs a bottle. Well, the service proceeded. Twenty poor women, two Englishmen, four ragged beggars, cowering on the steps; and there was the priest at the altar, in a great robe of gold and damask, two little boys in white sur Ir is, my dear, the happy privilege of your sex in England, to quit the dinner-table after the wine-bottles have once or twice gone round it, and you are thereby saved (though, to be sure, I can't tell what the ladies do up stairs) you are saved two or three hours' excessive dulness, which the men are obliged to go through. something stronger, "the Prussians!") says a stout old major on halfpay. "We beat the French without them, sir, as beaten them we always have! We were thundering down the hill of Belle Alliance, sir, at the backs of them, and the French were crying Sauve qui peut' long before the Prussians ever touched them!" And so the battle opens, and for many |