One Would Also Like To Send To The Scrap-Heap The Enormous Seventeenth-Century Figures Of The Apostles On Their Consoles On The Piers, Which Form So Bad A Disfigurement In The Nave.

The treasure of the church is the great "Crucifixion" by Van Dyck, which is hung in the south transept, but generally kept covered.

To see other stately pictures you must go to the church of St. Jean, where is a splendid altar triptych by Rubens, the centre panel of which is the "Adoration of the Magi"; or to the fifteenth-century structure of Notre Dame au dela de la Dyle (the clumsy title is used, I suppose, for the sake of distinction from the classical Notre Dame d'Hanswyck), where Rubens' "Miraculous Draught of Fishes" is sometimes considered the painter's masterpiece. It is not yet clear whether this noble picture has been destroyed in the recent bombardment. Even to those who care little for art, a stroll to these two old churches through the sleepy back-streets of Malines, with their white and sunny houses, can hardly fail to gratify.

If Malines is a backwater of the Middle Time, as somnolent or as dull (so some, I suppose, would call it) as the strange dead towns of the Zuyder Zee, or as Coggeshall or Thaxted in our own green Essex, Antwerp, at any rate, which lies only some fifteen miles or so to the north of it, is very much awake, and of aspect mostly modern, though not without some very curious and charming relics of antiquity embedded in the heart of much recent stone and mortar.

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