The Huge Standard Candelabrum To The North Of The
Altar, With Its Crowning Crucifixion; The Lectern, With Its
Triumphant Eagle
And prostrate dragon; the font, with its cover,
and the holy-water stoup almost as big as a small font
(In
Brittany I have seen them as big as a bath); and the beautiful
brass railings that surround the splendid Tabernacle that was
executed in 1552 by Cornelius de Vriendt, the brother of the
painter Frans Floris, and that towers high into the vaulting to a
height of fifty-two feet. One realizes more completely in a quiet
village church like this the breadth and intensity of the wave of
artistic impulse that swept through the Lowlands in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries than is possible in half a dozen hurried
visits to a picture gallery at Antwerp or Brussels. Finally Hal,
to conclude our list of minor places, has a grand fourteenth-
century church, with a miracle-working Virgin, and a little red-
brick town hall of characteristically picturesque aspect.
The railway journey from Brussels to Antwerp traverses a typical
bit of Belgian landscape that is as flat as a pancake; and the
monotony is only relieved, first by the little town of Vilvoorde,
where William Tyndale was burnt at the stake on October 6, 1536,
though not alive, having first been mercifully strangled, and
afterwards by the single, huge, square tower of Malines (or
Mechlin) Cathedral, which dominates the plain from enormous
distances, like the towers of Ely or Lincoln, though not, like
these last, by virtue of position on a hill, but solely by its own
vast height and overwhelming massiveness.
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