This Is Another Fine Building, Though Utterly Eclipsed By Its Huge Secular Rival, That Was Commenced In The Thirteenth Century, And Is Typically Belgian, As Opposed To French, In The Character Of Its Architecture, And Not Least In Its Possession Of A Single Great West Tower.

This last feature is characteristic of every big church in Belgium - one can add them up by the dozen:

Bruges, Ghent, Louvain (though ruined, or never completed), Oudenarde, Malines, Mons - save Brussels, where the church of Ste. Gudule, called persistently, but wrongly, the cathedral, has the full complement of two, and Antwerp, where two were intended, though only one has been actually raised. This tower at Ypres, however, fails to illustrate - perhaps because it is earlier, and therefore in better taste - that astounding disproportion in height that is so frequently exhibited by Belgian towers, as at Malines, or in the case of the famous belfry in the market-place at Bruges, when considered with reference to the church, or town hall, below. In front of the High Altar, in the pavement, is an inconspicuous square of white stone, which marks the burial-place of Cornelius Jansen, who died of the plague, as Bishop of Ypres, in 1638. The monument, if you can call it monument, is scarcely less insignificant than the simple block, in the cemetery of Plainpalais at Geneva, that is traditionally said to mark the resting-place of Calvin. Yet Jansen, in his way, proved almost a second Calvin in his death, and menaced the Church from his grave with a second Reformation. He left behind in manuscript a book called "Augustinus," the predestinarian tenor of which was condemned finally, though nearly a century later, by Pope Clement XI., in 1713, in the Bull called Unigenitus. Jansenism, however, had struck deep its roots in France, and still survives in Holland at the present day, at Utrecht, as a sect that is small, indeed, but not altogether obscure. Jansen himself, it may be noted, was a Hollander by birth, having been born in 1585 at Akkoi in that kingdom.

If Ypres is to be praised appropriately as a still delightful old city that has managed to retain to a quite singular degree the outward aspect and charm of the Middle Ages, one feels that one has left one's self without any proper stock of epithets with which to appraise at its proper value the charm and romance of Bruges. Of late years, it is true, this world-famed capital of West Flanders has lost something of its old somnolence and peace. Malines, in certain quarters, is now much more dead-alive, and Wordsworth, who seems to have visualized Bruges in his mind as a network of deserted streets, "whence busy life hath fled," might perhaps be tempted now to apply to it the same prophetic outlook that he imagined for Pendragon Castle:

"Viewing As in a dream her own renewing."

One hopes, indeed, that the renewing of Bruges will not proceed too zealously, even if Bruges come safely through its present hour of crisis.

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