CHAPTER II.
ST. NICHOLAS—MECHLIN.
Quays of Antwerp—Peculiar mode of training young trees—The Scheldt—The flying bridge of Napoleon—Story of Van Speyk—Polder at the Tête de Flandres—Its catastrophe in 1837—Zwyndrecht—Different professions of the Belgian saints—Story of the curate of St. Joachim—Beveren—St. Nicholas—Dense population—A market—Flemish ballad-singers—Ancient drama of Flanders—Tamise—Ruinous condition of the cotton trade in Belgium since the revolution—Its causes—Inability of the government to afford relief—Diminution of exports since 1833—Remarkable petition of the trade to the legislature—Remedies suggested by them—Impracticability of any commercial union with France—Or the Zollverein—Dendermonde—Siege by the Duke of Marlborough—Description of its present state—Its manufactures—Mechlin—Curious old city—The Archbishop Sterckz—A political prelate—Mechlin lace—Flax—The Cathedral of St. Romoald—The tower—Carillon—Immense bells—The corporation of Mechlin—The tomb of the Bertholdi—Van Eyck’s paintings—Vandyke’s Crucifixion—Superiority of Rubens in composition—Church of Notre-Dame—“The miraculous draught of fishes”—Favourite paintings of Rubens in the Church of St. John—Hôtel de St. Jaques.
We started early this morning for St. Nicholas, the central town of one of the most important linen districts in Belgium, being the great mart for the produce of the Pays de Waes. Before leaving Antwerp, we took another walk through its principal squares and along the quay. The latter which is of great length, stretching up the banks of the Scheldt, is planted with tall trees, and well finished in every respect. These trees are trained in the nurseries of the Low Countries, specially for the purpose of planting in streets and squares. They are regularly pruned, like standard fruit trees for eight or ten years, till the stems, have attained ten or fifteen feet in height before they are removed, and having in the mean time, been frequently transplanted to render the roots fibrous and hardy, they are placed in their intended position, with scarcely any risk of failure or delay in the renewal of their growth.
The Scheldt is here about the breadth of the Mersey at Liverpool, and we crossed it by a steam ferry, to the Tête de Flandres. During the reign of Napoleon, this passage was made by a flying bridge, one of those ingenious contrivances, which are still seen upon the Rhine, in which a line of boats, attached to a large float, and sustaining the length of the cable by which it is moored in the centre of the river, are moved from side to side across the stream, accordingly as their heads and helms are adjusted, to allow the force of the current to impinge upon them. The river opposite Antwerp is so deep, as to allow the largest vessels to lie close along side the wharfs, but its waters, from the nature of the soil they traverse, are always yellow with sand and mud, and rush past between the city and the Tête de Flandres, with a rapidity that anything but justifies Goldsmith’s title of the “lazy” Scheldt.
In the river, nearly opposite the commercial basins, there occurred in 1831 an instance of heroic devotion in a young officer of the Dutch navy, for which it is rare to find a parallel. He was a Lieutenant, named Van Speyk, and in command of one of the gun boats, which had guard upon the citadel, whilst yet in the hands of the Dutch. It was in the month of February, and the little bark had been compelled to seek shelter from the drifting ice, by running into the harbour of Flushing. A storm, however, drove her from her moorings, and forced her on shore nearly opposite the city of Antwerp. The efforts of the crew to work her off were unavailing, and a crowd of the revolutionary canaille were already waiting on the quay, to secure the prize and their prisoners, when the young commander went below, and with the aid of one companion opened the powder magazine, gave his assistant a moment’s time to plunge into the sea, and then applying his match, blew up himself and thirty of his sailors, rather than fall into the hands of his enemies.
On landing at the Tête de Flandres, the little fortress which commands the level polder in front of Antwerp, we drove along a causeway raised several feet above the level of the plain. This vast alluvial district was laid under water in 1832, during the siege of Antwerp, and continued submerged till 1835, when the water was again expelled; but three years ago, the breach in the dyke, which had been imperfectly repaired, gave way during an extraordinary tide, inundated the whole plain, and swept away some thirty or forty peasants, who were passing along the road to the market of Antwerp. The view back upon the city from this point is one of the finest imaginable, all its bold and salient features coming into one coup-d’œil; the river, the noble line of quays, the citadel, the gigantic Hanseatic depôt, and rising far into the sky, above them all, the majestic and beautiful tower of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
The road passed through the little village of Zwyndrecht, a secluded little spot embowered in trees upon the verge of the great polder. The income of the curate, a comfortable and easy divine, who saluted us from the roadside, is thirty pounds a year, but the saint to whom the church is dedicated, St. Makuyt, being in high repute for the cure of weak limbs in children, brings in a handsome income in addition. The fame of the saint, is in fact, the main source of income to the incumbents of these miserable livings, many hundreds of which do not exceed that of Zwyndrecht. The first question of a priest, in fact, on being offered a benefice, is, what is the stipend? the second, who is the saint? The reason is this, that the whole contents of Pandora’s box, all the diseases of mankind have been parcelled out to the various saints of the calendar, each taking his or her own peculiar department of the pharmacopœia:—thus, Saint Blaize is consulted for the quinsey, St. Nicholas for barrenness, St. Apollonia for the tooth-ache, St. Dorothea of Alois for pining children, St. Œdilia for weak eyes, St. Cornelius for the hooping-cough, St. Joseph au besoin for ladies who are anxious for heirs, St. Wendelin for the murrain in cattle, and St. Gertrude to drive away rats. Of all the most valuable and money-making are the ladies who preside over the illnesses of infants; not only the frequency of the malady, but the alarm of the mother contributing to the fame and the profits of the saint. Not merely Roman Catholic ladies who laugh at the powers ascribed to the saint, but even protestants, who, in their calmer moments, despise the imposture, seldom fail in the last extremity to call in the aid of the priest; they distrust the profession, but they shrink from neglecting the last expedient, however, unpromising. If the patient sinks under the process, that arises from the parent having been too long in applying, and, if it revives, the faith of the mother receives a powerful inclination towards belief in the church.
Mons. D—— who was in the carriage with us, mentioned rather an amusing anecdote connected with the system. His uncle is a priest and incumbent of a parish, the patron saint of which, Saint Joachim has under his charge the department of deafness. The income of his living is small, but it is far more than exceeded by the profits of the saint, who has been gradually rising into repute during the last fifty years that the old gentleman has had him under his care. He came, however, a short time since to visit his nephew at Antwerp, and feelingly complained of a disaster, which was likely to ruin both the saint and his practice; he had completed his eightieth year, and had grown so deaf himself, that he could no longer make out the complaints of his patients!
Beveren, a beautiful village, half way between St. Nicholas and Antwerp, is the residence almost exclusively of rich families and retired citizens, most of whom are the proprietors of the lands of the district. Amongst them, one house was pointed out as that of M. Borlut, a lineal descendant of one of the leaders of Ghent, who distinguished himself at the battle of the Golden Spurs in 1302.
St. Nicholas, where we arrived for breakfast, is a long straggling town, with an immense market place, in which Napoleon once reviewed a division of his army. The prosperity of this little place is very remarkable and arises altogether from the flourishing condition of the flax trade. In 1788, the population was but eight thousand, and it is now upwards of eighteen. The country around is one of the most populous in the world, the inhabitants amounting, according to the statistical account of M. Van den Bogaerde, to no less than 5210 individuals to a square league, of whom sixty in every hundred are agriculturists, twenty-five tradesmen, and fourteen live by other means.
It was market day and the town crowded by the peasantry, who were bringing in the flax to the “deliveries” of the several merchants, who attended from Ghent and Antwerp. M. Cools, who is member of the Chamber of Representatives for the district, did us the favour to accompany us over the town. The market place was filled with stalls and booths of dress, hardware and furniture, great piles of wooden shoes, were spread over the pavement, and amongst the agricultural produce, was a profusion of buck wheat (sarassin) which is made into a sort of soft, sodden cake, by no means unpalatable.
I was amused by a chorus of ballad singers, who occupied a moveable stage in the market, furnished with a large painted scene, divided into compartments, each representing some incident in the songs, with which they favoured a very numerous audience, who were grouped in great delight around them. I bought the ballad which was in Flemish, and contained three pieces, two of them drinking songs, which were illustrated in the scene above, by a party seated in an estaminet. The song was an eclogue in which two farmers, like Tytyrus and Melibœus, complained of the pressure of the times, Tytyrus professed to be so poor, that he could no longer afford to pay his barber, Melibœus assures him that bad as their position is, it is no worse than it was under Napoleon, and both join in the refrain, that geneva is the only remedy against all evils, political as well as personal. The third was a metrical account of a girl, called Joanna Scholtz, who had recently been executed for murder, and the different compartments of the scene, exhibited each stage of the story from the innocence of the heroine, to her exit at the guillotine. The impression which this latter ditty made on the nerves of the audience was prodigious, as the female singer who took the chief voice in it, with the energy, at least, if not with the elegance of Malibran, proceeded from verse to verse, pointing with a wand, which she bore in her hand, to the pictorial illustration of the story behind her. This travelling orchestra with its waggon and scenery, is surely very like Horace’s account of the chorus, whence sprung the drama in ancient Greece? By the way, I was told by Count d’Haneal Ghent, that there exists a copy of an original comedy in Flemish, of a date much anterior to any written drama, in any of the modern languages of Europe.
After breakfast we continued our drive to Tamise or Thames, a manufacturing village on the Scheldt, which with another near it, called Waesminster, are said to have been so named in honor of King Edward III. At Thames we went over the cotton factory of M. Talboom. It is on a moderate scale, having about 6 to 7000 spindles, the machinery partly French, but chiefly from the Phœnix works at Ghent. The men and girls employed, work fourteen hours a day, exclusive of two hours for stoppages. We expressed our impression of the severity of this, but were told, that it was indispensable, in order to maintain their position in the market. The proprietor, who expressed the utmost alarm and dissatisfaction at the state of the trade observed, that if circumstances should enable the English producers of cotton yarn, to reduce their prices by a single figure, then those of Belgium must abandon the manufacture, which even, at present, was not paying its own support. Like almost every other branch of national industry, the cotton manufacture which had attained a high degree of prosperity during the union with Holland, experienced an instantaneous reverse from the events of the revolution. Factory after factory closed its doors, some in ruin, others to transfer their capital and industry to Holland, whose extensive colonies afforded that outlet for their produce, which they could no longer find at home. The ministry to check the downward career, resorted to the absurd and childish expedient of purchasing up the surplus production of the manufacturers, in order to export it at a loss, and thus get it out of the country and out of the way, only to make room for fresh accumulation of stock, and renewed adventures by the government. In this way the trade dragged on a fictitious existence, exposed to peril by every fluctuation of the markets of England, and from time to time deluged by importations made at a moment when it was necessary to get rid of a glut in the market of that country or in France. For the last two years, however, its condition has been most precarious and threatening, its consumers still further diminished by the partition of the provinces of Luxembourg and Limbourg with Holland, and by an alteration in the cost of raw cotton, and the unusual preference given to woollen fabrics above those of cotton in almost every country of Europe. In 1835, those interested in the trade made an importunate and alarming application to the government, exposing the danger in which they found themselves and imploring assistance; the ministers were compelled to admit the urgency of the case, to confess that their protection was utterly inadequate, and to propose early measures for their relief,—but the trade bitterly complain, that up to the present hour, nothing whatever has been attempted in their behalf. But in fact what has the government in its power? It cannot give them that which is their only remedy, it cannot conquer or force for them a market and consumption proportionate to their means of production. Year after year their exports have been growing less and less since 1830. In 1833, according to a return in the volume of M. Briavionne,[5] they exported a million of kilogrammes of cotton goods; in 1834, nine hundred thousand; in 1835, seven; in 1836, six; in 1837 upwards of five; in 1838 and 1839, upwards of four; a reduction of sixty per cent. upon the trade in the short period of six years! In the meantime, as the Belgian spinners are inferior to the English and French in the production of the finer description of goods, the importations of these direct, during the same period, have suffered no material diminution, whilst their introduction by smuggling and contraband, is still carried on to an extent which M. Briavionne states to be beyond calculation.
It is a matter to me utterly inexplicable, that under such an aspect of affairs, the number of power looms has been, nevertheless increasing from year to year, and Ghent has, at this moment, 2000 more than it had in 1830. The fact is admitted, and imperfectly accounted for in a memorial presented this year to the legislature from the cotton manufacturers of Belgium, who ascribe the increase to the expectation that the government would speedily redeem its pledge of 1835, and place the trade on such a footing of protection and encouragement as would restore to it that prosperity in which it basked before the revolution of 1830, and in the interim that it was indispensible to make extraordinary efforts in order to keep the trade alive at all.
The document in which this passage occurs is in every respect a very remarkable one;[6] it emanates from the entire body of the trade in Belgium, not from those of Ghent alone, where the revolution is known to be unpopular, but those also of Brussels where it originated, of Courtrai, Renaix and St. Nicholas. It makes a disclosure of the difficulties under which the national commerce is suffering and their causes; and suggests expedients for the remedy in terms as frank as they are forcible. After stating that in England, France, Germany and America, the manufacture of cotton has increased since 1829 from 50 to 75 per cent., they proceed to show that in the same space of time, it has declined in Belgium not only in profits but in actual amount. “In Brussels,” they say, “at the time of the revolution there were four factories of the first class in full action: at present there is but one, and even it has ceased to work, and four minor establishments have utterly disappeared within the same space of time; the proprietors of such as have not broken down by bankruptcy, taking advantage of such accidents as the burning of their mills to escape from the trade, or withdrawing with their capital to Holland. In the face of our country, with our hands upon our hearts, we declare solemnly that the cotton trade of Belgium has been sinking continually since the events of 1830; that it is verging to ruin, and that its destruction is to be traced to the neglect of the legislature to adopt an effectual line of commercial policy for its protection.”
After disclaiming all implication of the cotton trade in the over speculation and imprudences which had ruined other branches in the years preceding, they go on to say, that “notwithstanding every circumspection and expedient that, as prudent men, they could adopt to make head against the storm, they find themselves silently and fatally undermined by an evil which they have long foreseen, and against which they have been guarding since the revolution with less success than earnestness. They find themselves overwhelmed and crushed “(dominés et écrasés)” by foreign competition. Their home market every day wrested from them, and the little space over which they can distribute the produce of their industry, becoming every hour more circumscribed and contracted. Only look to the situation of the trade in Belgium, and it will present to you something remarkable, and at first inexplicable. The Belgian possesses all the skill and ability of his competitors; his position for commerce is advantageous, and in some departments the wages of labour, if not more favourable, are at least equally so with those of other countries; and notwithstanding all, we are utterly unequal to contend with them, and the struggle must inevitably be mortal in the long run: “la lutte nous deviendra mortelle à la longue.”
“But how can it be otherwise? We share our own home markets with our rivals, whilst they effectually exclude us from any participation in theirs. Here is a constant source of our weakness, our competitors reaping advantages from our errors that strengthen them to contend with ourselves. The true economy of machinery and the only means of selling cheaply is to sell largely. But in Belgium the consumption is the least conceivable, divided and attenuated as it is by importations from abroad. For printing calicoes, for example, the cost of engraving a roller, is the same in France, in England, and in Belgium, but from the same roller, the English manufacturer has a demand for five thousand pieces, the French one for five hundred, and the Belgian but fifty. It is with impressions upon cloth as with impressions upon paper—the book, of which a prodigious number of copies will be sold, can be offered at a price little more than the cost of the paper, and in like manner, the printed goods of England and France can be sold for the bare cost of the grey calico in Belgium.
But that which of all else inflicts the most serious injury on the cotton trade of Belgium, is her periodical inundation with the surplus stock of her rivals, which is poured from time to time into her markets with instructions to force a sale at any price, no matter how trifling. Cottons, for which in the season of the spring they asked three francs, are all a few months later exported to Belgium, and sold gladly for one franc and a half or a franc and a quarter, thus bringing the finest and most valuable muslins of France into direct competition with the coarse fabrics of Belgium. These injurious importations take place at the commencement of almost every season, the printers of France, before they bring out their new designs, making a clear sweep of the old, and carefully avoiding to reduce their prices at home, they force them into consumption in Belgium, which affords the nearest and most convenient market for the purpose. The crises and commercial fluctuations of other countries, thus become equally ruinous with our own, but with this aggravation, that prudence may guard against the one, but no foresight or precautions can suffice to ward off the other.”
Such is the situation of the home market—the case of the export trade is equally painfully depicted, and referred without reserve or false delicacy to its genuine cause. “The success of the foreign trade in cotton,” continues the memorial, “must have a certain support from the market at home in order to enable the producer to export with advantage, but this unfortunately is the point in which of all others Belgium is specially deficient. Her trade had formerly an outlet in the Indian possessions of the Netherlands, whose advantages were exclusively secured to her by the privileges accorded to her flag.[7] All her surplus productions found here a vent which was every day becoming more and more important. Was there a superabundance of produce at home, either from over production amongst her own tradesmen, or excessive imports from abroad, the merchant could empty his warehouses into Java, without the necessity of stopping his machinery for a single hour. At the same time, the market of Holland herself, with two millions and a half of consumers, was thrown open to her. Such were her peculiar privileges then, but now the opening in India is closed against her goods—Holland takes continually less and less of her produce, being supplied, like herself, with the overstock of England and France—and we have just suffered in the loss of Limbourg and Luxembourg, a subtraction of 350,000 of our fellow subjects and customers. These are the facts in all their truth, and one path of safety alone lies open to us now, the securing to us inviolate the possession of our home consumption. This you can effect for us only by compelling our foreign competitors to retire from that position which they have hitherto been permitted to take up in our market by negligence, and by putting an end to their frauds upon the revenue. You must either be prepared to do this, or to annex us to some more extended territory, ‘ou vous nous adjoindrez à un plus grand territoire.’
We call upon you then as our representatives to take effectual steps for securing to us our legitimate rights, that is to say, the undisturbed enjoyment of the only market that has been left to us, or to supply its place either by a commercial union with France, or by an accession to the commercial league of Germany. We call upon you to adopt these measures without farther delay—our sufferings are keen and they have been of long endurance—and, if in spite of every effort to save us, you at last discover its impossibility, we entreat of you, as a last favour, at least to say so openly. We shall then avail ourselves of such an announcement to shorten our struggles, and to bring to a close sacrifices and exertions that have swallowed up our capital and our time. You, at least, may obtain for us this, that our government will tell us what it means to do. Ten thousand families are hanging upon us for bread—fifty thousand individuals, men, women and children, spread over town and country, and dispersed through every province, depend upon our establishments for employment, and when this fails, they have no other resource to fly to. It remains with you to preserve to Belgium a branch of her industry which firm determination may yet retrieve, and which only requires vigorous resolution to free it from the tribute which it now pays to the stranger.”
This importunate document produced, as might have been anticipated no beneficial result—the government have not the power to aid them—their three propositions are all alike beyond their reach;—to effectually suppress smuggling from abroad would require a custom house police, which along so vast a frontier and so extensive a coast, would cost more than all the trade it would protect could afford to pay;—and to gain commercial advantages by a treaty with France is as hopeless a suggestion, as the proposal of a junction with the Prussian league has proved impracticable and abortive. The ultimate preservation of the cotton trade of Belgium, in all its branches of spinning, weaving and printing, seems to me utterly hopeless by any ordinary policy, and only to be achieved by a resort to some expedient as yet untried.
From Tamise, we drove through a richly planted country along the left bank of the Scheldt to Dendermonde, or as it is called, Termonde. This is a gloomy old town, very silent and unattractive, with nothing remarkable except its huge fortifications, and these I am as unable to describe as my Uncle Toby was, before he got his map, to make his audience comprehend “the differences and distinctions between the scarp and counter-scarp—the glacis and the covered way—the half-moon and the ravelin.”
Our associations with the name of Dendermonde are all
“Of vallies and retires, and trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners ransomed, and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.”
In the great square, which is close by the banks of the river, stands the Town Hall, a flat looking building, and beside it, a news room and saloon for balls, but all seemed to be deserted, and we scarcely saw twenty persons within the walls. A sight of it is sufficient to satisfy one of the practicability of the expedient resorted to by Vendome, in 1706, when defending the town against the Duke of Marlborough, (or rather his brother, who conducted the siege) of laying the country under water up to the walls of the town. By a singular coincidence, however, the expedient proved unsuccessful, as the waters of the Scheldt fell so low as to reduce the floods on the lowlands to a fordable depth. The Duke, in his letter to Lord Godolphin, says: “Dendermonde could never have been taken but by the hand of God, which gave us seven weeks without rain. The rain began the very next day after we had possession, and continued till the evening. I believe the King of France will be a good deal surprised, when he shall have heard that the garrison has been obliged to surrender themselves prisoners of war, for upon being told that the preparations were making for the siege, he said: 'they must have an army of ducks to take Dendermonde.’”
Teniers lived in Dendermonde, of which his lady was a native, and the house he occupied, with a fresco over the mantel-piece of the saloon, is still shown to visitors. It has some manufactories of cotton and wool, but the only process we saw was one of those mills for crushing oil, which as they find both the raw material and the consumer upon the spot, seems to be amongst the most prosperous establishments in Belgium.
The journey by the railroad from Dendermonde to Mechlin, a distance of sixteen miles, is performed in about half-an-hour. Mechlin quite comes up to one’s expectations of it. I had always heard of it by its soubriquet of Malines la Propre, and associated it with the stateliness and quaintness of “Mechlin lace:” and certainly it is just such an old place as one would imagine likely to produce such collars and lappets as one sees in Vandyke’s portraits—quiet, grotesque-looking old houses of great size, and with rich and sober ornaments and decorations to the points and gables, tall gothic churches, and streets accurately clean, with groups of cheerful, contented-looking loungers at the doors, and here and there a demure ecclesiastic, stepping silently along in his black gown and silk sash, with his little three-cornered hat and white bands, edged with black ribband, and broad silver buckles to his shoes.
Mechlin is full of priests, as it abounds in churches, and is the residence of an Archbishop. The present prelate is M. Sterckx, son to a farmer at the village of Ophem, but one of the most restless, energetic and ambitious ecclesiastics that ever aspired to political power. He obtained his present See subsequently to the Revolution, but he is now the leading spirit of the parti-prêtre in the legislature, and his will and wishes, transmitted through becoming channels, serve to “move, direct, and animate the whole” policy of the state, in the present ascendant position of the church in both houses. The Abbé de Pradt was Bishop of Mechlin under Napoleon.
Malines is a very antique place; its name has been derived from Maris linea, and the influence of the tide upon the current of the Scheldt, and its tributary, the Dyle, on the side of which it is built, is felt for a mile beyond the town. It was once fortified, and besieged by Marlborough and others, but the French levelled the ramparts and filled up the fosse in 1804. Its lace manufacture has been sadly interfered with by other competitors, but above all, by the invention of tulle and bobbin-net, but the genuine specimens of its ancient production are still in the most distinguished repute. The other occupations of the population, which is somewhere about 20,000, are the manufactures of cashmere shawls, and chairs of gilded leather, which were, at one time, an article of export, so choice was the taste of their designs; they still engage upwards of four hundred workmen, and are in as great repute as ever with the Dutch. The district around is as usual, highly agricultural, and the canals which traverse it and pass by the city, have rendered Mechlin a prosperous seat of the flax trade, and quite an entrepôt for corn and oil.
The only objects of interest, and depositaries of art in Mechlin, are, as usual, the churches. The Cathedral, whose solid moresco tower is seen from a vast distance, is of great antiquity, though not remarkable for its beauty. The tower is of amazing height, though unfinished; we ascended it by a stone staircase, in which I lost count after reckoning an ascent of five hundred steps; I should, therefore, conclude it to be at least three hundred feet high. It contains one of those “corals for grown gentlemen,” as some Fadladeen in music has denominated the carillons of the Netherlands—a chime of innumerable stops, set in motion by machinery. But, I confess, that the well arranged harmony of the carillons is to me infinitely more pleasing than the monotonous clangour that on fête days in London, disturb the city from its propriety, or the sweet but “drowsy tinklings” from every church and convent, that load the air with sound on an evening in Italy. Their gay and measured melody sometimes strikes so unexpectedly upon the ear, descending through such a distance from the sky, that it, also, seems like the song of Ariel attracting Ferdinand:—
“Where should this music be? i’ the air or i’ the earth?
This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes.
It swept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air.”
Some of the city bells, in another chamber above, are of inconceivable size, one of them being 15,000 pounds in weight. Whilst we were in the room, two of the Mechlin “youths” came in to ring the peal, which always sounds before sunset; and although the one they selected was the third or fourth in point of size, and they set it in motion by means of a lever, worked with the foot, it occupied from seven to ten minutes before they succeeded in producing an oscillation so great as to make the tongue of the bell strike the sides. On the outside of the tower, at this height, is a dial for the clock; a circle, the same size of which, is designed in small stones upon the pavement of the square below, connected, I think, with a sun-dial; I paced it and found it upwards of forty feet in diameter, although its counterpart on the tower looks to be of the ordinary size, such is its extreme elevation. The guide who conducted us to the top, pointed out a balcony from which a watchman, who is always stationed aloft to look out for fires, fell, a short time ago; he was taken up below, as our informant said, “as soft as a pack of wool.” The tower and its bells are a distinct and separate erection from the church, although united to it, and belong to the corporation of the city—a remnant of the olden time, when every free city had its “belfry.” This corporation seems still to have absolute power within their bailiwick, and not to exercise it with due “discretion,” they prevented the passage of a canal, from Louvain through their streets, which would have been of most signal advantage to their trade; and, more recently, they stoutly and successfully resisted the government in bringing the central depôt of the railroads within the circuit of the city, instead of fixing it, as they have been compelled to do, at some distance beyond its boundary—a circumstance which they now sensibly regret.
The church itself is dedicated to St. Romoald, whose body, enclosed in a suitable shrine, is deposited upon the high altar. In the choir, a chapter of the Golden Fleece was held in 1491, at which Henry VII of England was invested with the insignia of the order. In the curtain wall of the choir, to the left of the altar, there is rather an interesting monument of the family of the Bertholdi, a powerful house, who in the thirteenth century, having been entrusted with the office of “Protector” of Malines, by the Prince Bishop of Liege, to whose dominion it was attached, succeeded in making themselves independent of their Sovereign, and for some generations, held absolute authority as Lords of Malines. The inscription on their tomb is quaint and poetical:—“Trium Betholdorum, qui sæculo decimo tertio Mechliniæ dominarunt hic ultima domus.” There are numbers of other marble monuments of ancient Archbishops and prelates of Mechlin, but none of them so interesting as this.
There is a curious series of old paintings, illustrative of the actions of St. Romoald, which are attributed to Van Eyck, and are, at all events, referable to his period and school; an inscription relates, that in the sixteenth century they were hidden, to elude the fury of the Iconoclasts; and another records their second removal in 1794 or 5, “tempore perturbationis Gallorum,” to escape the equally formidable insanity of the French revolutionists.
This church has, also, a magnificent picture of the Crucifixion by Vandyke; but, however astonishing in its vigorous excellence, and in the conception of its individual parts, its comparison, as a whole, with that of Rubens’ Descent from the Cross, or his painting of the same subject in the Museum at Antwerp, will sufficiently exhibit the superiority of the latter in the art of composition. Like a perfect drama, into which no character is admitted, that does not contribute to heighten the denouement, there is no figure or expression in Rubens’ picture, that has not an immediate reference to the main action of the moment, and that does not conspire to concentrate all the interest in one simultaneous movement. In Vandyke’s Crucifixion, however, the three crosses form three distinct episodes, each tells a separate story, and thus divides the interest of the subject, instead of working it up into one overpowering sensation, as Rubens does. But, on the other hand, this splendid picture exhibits all Vandyke’s masterly powers of individuality and detail, every figure is a study, and above all, the beautiful Magdalene at the foot of the Cross, is one of the most lovely conceptions that has ever been embodied upon canvass. Sir Joshua Reynolds says “this may be justly considered one of the first pictures in the world, and gives the highest idea of the genius of Vandyke.” The agony of the dying thief may be strongly suspected of being suggested by Rubens. The Cathedral possesses one of the very finest carved pulpits in the Netherlands, representing the conversion of St. Paul, in which the terror of the horse, and the fall of the rider, are exhibited with the most surprising vigour and effect.
In another church, that of Notre Dame, there is a picture by Rubens of the miraculous draught of fishes, which with its volets once formed eight subjects, which he painted in ten days for the chapel of the Poissonniers. The entire were carried to Paris, and only five returned. Another of his favourite pictures is the Adoration of the Magi, in the church of St. John, of which he used to say, “c’est à Saint. Jean de Malines, qu’il faut aller pour voir de mes beaux ouvrages.” I must say, however, that it did not afford me the same pleasure, which it must have done to the great painter himself. The sacristan showed us an autograph receipt of Rubens for 1800 florins, for this picture and its volets, all of which he painted in eighteen days. It bears date in March, 1624. The altar of the church was likewise designed by him, and the walls are covered with a profusion of paintings, the works of artists of minor eminence, and whose merits, though they would be recognized elsewhere, are unfavourably brought into contrast with those of their great master.
We dined at one of the most comfortable and clean hotels I have seen in Belgium, that of St. Jacques, in the Marché aux Grains, and returned, by the railroad, to a very inferior one at Brussels, though much more pretending.