INTERIOR OF MECHLIN CATHEDRAL.

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Mechlin.

In the Cathedral of Mechlin, some twenty minutes by rail from Brussels, we have another typical Brabant church of the fourteen hundreds—not all of it, but a very considerable portion. It is a grand old building, but the interior has suffered much at the hands of enemies and of friends, and whatever may have been the case in former days it is now more impressive without than within, as the accompanying sketches show. Albeit it is well worth visiting, were it only for the sake of the Kelderman tower.

Mechlin is rich in mediæval domestic architecture—richer than any other town in Belgium save, perhaps, Bruges. It contains a host of quaint old burgher houses in stone and brick and timber, notably on the Quai de l'Avoine,[35] and at least three ancient palaces:—the palace of Marguerite of Austria in the Rue de l'Empereur, the Hôtel Busleyden in the Rue des Vaches, and, most picturesque of all, that mysterious old red brick mansion on a back-water of the Dyle behind Saint Rombold's, in the Rue de l'Ecoutete.[36] The visitor to Brussels must certainly make many journeys to Mechlin.

There are other churches in the neighbourhood of Brussels which date wholly or in part from the period during which the architecture of Brabant attained the heyday of its glory. Several of them are most beautiful, none without some interesting features, all well worth considering; but their name is legion, and it would be hopeless to attempt to describe so many buildings, or to give any adequate account of their numerous historical associations, within the limits of our poor little pocket-book. For Brussels and Louvain were each of them suzerains of a host of smaller towns; not mere village communities called towns, as it were, by courtesy, but regularly organised cities—in miniature, some of them, if you will; some of them of considerable size, and harbouring a very considerable population. Great or small, they were all endowed with municipal institutions, and, too, with all those social, industrial, commercial and religious institutions which throughout the Middle Age were inseparable from civic life in the Netherlands, and most of them, at the time of which we are writing, were prosperous.

Now think of what all this means in the way of bricks and mortar. Each had its market, its Town