Several fine canals run in a variety of directions from Bruges: by one of them, boats can go, in the course of a summer’s day, to Ostend, Nieuport, Furnes, and Dunkirk; and vessels of four hundred tuns can float in the bason of this town. Another canal leads to Ghent, another to Damme, and another to Sluys. The water of those canals is stagnant, without the least motion; yet they can, in half an hour, be all emptied, and fresh water brought in, by means of their well-contrived sluices. This water, however, is never used for drinking, or even for culinary purposes; a better sort being conveyed through the town by pipes from the two rivers Lys and Scheldt, as in London; for which, as there, every house pays a certain tax.
Although the trade of this city has, like that of all the Low Countries, been gradually declining, and daily sucked into the vortices of British and Dutch commerce, there were, till the French entered it, many rich Merchants there, who met every day at noon in the great market-place, to communicate and transact business, which was chiefly done in the Flemish language, hardly any one in it speaking French; a circumstance that by this time is much altered——for they have been already made, if not to speak French, at least to sing Ca-ira, and dance to the tune of it too, to some purpose.
The once-famed grandeur of this city consisted chiefly, like that of all grand places in the dark periods of Popery, of the gloomy piles, the ostentatious frippery and unwieldy[unwieldy] masses of wealth, accumulated by a long series of Monkish imposture——of Gothic structures, of enormous size and sable aspect, filled with dreary cells, calculated to strike the souls of the ignorant and enthusiastic with holy horror, to inspire awe of the places, and veneration for the persons who dared to inhabit them, and, by enfeebling the reason with the mixed operations of horror, wonder and reverence, to fit the credulous for the reception of every imposition, however gross in conception, or bungled in execution. Those are the things which constituted the greatness and splendor of the cities of Ancient Christendom; to those has the sturdiest human vigour and intellect been forced to bend the knees: they were built to endure the outrages of time; and will stand, I am sure, long, long after their power shall have been annihilated.
What a powerful engine has superstition been, in the cunning management of Priests! How lamentable it is to think, that not only all who believed, but all who had good sense enough not to believe, should, for so many centuries, have been kept in prostrate submission to the will and dominion of an old man in Rome!——My blushes for the folly and supineness of Mankind, however, are lost in a warm glow of transport at the present irradiation of the human mind; and though I can scarcely think with patience of that glorious, Godlike being, Henry the Second of England, being obliged by the Pope to lash himself naked at the tomb of that saucy, wicked Priest, Thomas a Becket, I felicitate myself with the reflection, that the Pope is now the most contemptible Sovereign in Europe, and that the Papal authority, which was once the terror and the scourge of the earth, is now not only not recognised, but seldom thought of, and, when thought of, only serves to excite laughter or disgust.
LETTER VII.
The town of Bruges, although the streets be, as I have already described them, so mean, narrow, dirty and irregular in general, contains, nevertheless, some few streets that are tolerable, and a few squares also that are far from contemptible.——I should think it, nevertheless, not worth another letter of description, were it not that the Churches, and Church-curiosities, demand our attention; for you will observe, that in all rich Popish Countries, every Church is a holy toy-shop, or rather a museum, where pictures, statues, gold cups, silver candlesticks, diamond crucifixes, and gods, of various sorts and dimensions, are hoarded up, in honour of the Supreme Being. This city having been for centuries the See of a Bishop, who is Suffragan to the Archbishop of Mechlin, and at the same time Hereditary Chancellor of Flanders, it is not to be wondered at, if ecclesiastical industry should have amassed some of those little trinkets which constitute the chief or only value of their Church. The mitre of this place conveys to the head that wears it a diocese containing six cities, from the names of which you will be able to form some small judgment of the opulence of one poor son of abstinence and mortification.——Those cities are, in the first place, Bruges itself, then Ostend, Sluys, Damme, Middleburgh in Flanders, and Oudenberch——not to mention one hundred and thirty-three boroughs and villages; and if you could compute the number of inferior Clergy with which the streets and highways are filled, you would be thunder-struck. There, and in all those Popish Countries, they may be seen, with grotesque habits and bald pates, buzzing up and down like bees, in swarms, (a precious hive!)——and, with the most vehement protestations of voluntary poverty in their mouths, and eyes uplifted to Heaven, scrambling for the good things of the earth with the eagerness of a pack of hounds, and the rapacity of a whole roll of lawyers! With loaded thighs (I might say, loaded arms too, for they have large pockets even in their sleeves, for the concealment of moveables), they return to the great hive, where, contrary to the law of bees, the drone lives in idle state, and he plunders them: contrary, too, to the habits of those useful insects, they banish the queen-bee, and suffer no female to approach their cells, but keep them in contiguous hives, where, under cover of the night, they visit them, and fulfil in private that which they deny in public——the great command of Providence.
The first building in nominal rank, though by no means the first in value, is the great Cathedral, which has at least bulk, antiquity and gloominess enough to recommend it to the Faithful. It is by no means unfurnished within, though not in so remarkable a manner as to induce me to fill a Letter with it. In a word, it is an old Popish Cathedral, and cannot be supposed wanting in wealth: at the time I write, it has been standing no less a time than nine hundred and twenty-nine years, having been built in the year 865.
The next that occurs to me, as worthy of notice, is the Church of Notre Dame, or that dedicated to our Lady the Virgin Mary. This is really a beautiful structure of the kind——indeed magnificent. Its steeple is beyond conception stupendous, being so very high as to be seen at sea off Ostend, although it is not elevated in the smallest degree by any rise in the ground; for, so very flat is the whole intermediate country, that I believe it would puzzle a skilful leveller to find two feet elevation from high-water-mark at Ostend up to this city. The contents of this Church are correspondent to its external appearance——being enriched and beautified with a vast variety of sacerdotal trinkets, and fine tombs and monuments. As to the former, the vestments of that same Thomas a Becket whom I mentioned in my last, make a part of the curiosities deposited in this Church: this furious and inflexible impostor was Archbishop of Canterbury; and his struggles to enslave both the King and People of England, and make them tributary to the Pope, have canonized him, and obtained the very honourable depot I mention for his vestments. To do justice, however, to the spirit and sagacity of the Holy Fathers who have so long taken the pains to preserve them, it must be commemorated, that they are, or at least were set with diamonds, and other precious stones! Probably, among the many Priests who have, in so many centuries, had the custody of those divine relics, some one, more sagacious than the rest, might conceive, that, to lie in a Church, and be seen by the all-believing eyes of the Faithful, a little coloured glass was just as good as any precious stone, and wisely have converted the originals to some better purpose. If so, it will be some consolation to Holy Mother Church to reflect, that she has bilked the Sans-culottes, who certainly have got possession of Saint Thomas a Becket’s sacerdotal petticoats; and, if they have been sound enough to stand the cutting, have, by this time, converted them into comfortable campaigning breeches. O monstrous! wicked! abominable!——that the Royal Mary, sister to the great Emperor Charles the Fifth, should, so long ago as the Reformation, have bought at an immense price, and deposited in the treasury of the Church of our Lady the blessed Virgin Mary, the vestments of a Saint, only to make breeches, in the year 1794, for a French soldier! The time has been, that the bare suggestion of such sacrilege would have turned the brain of half the people of Christendom: but those things are now better managed.