embarrassing variety of gold, silver, and copper. Even in ages of
comparative darkness, literature made feeble efforts to burst
through the entangled weeds of superstition, ignorance, and war.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, history was greatly
cultivated; and Froissart, Monstrelet, Olivier de la Marche, and
Philip de Comines, gave to their chronicles and memoirs a charm
of style since their days almost unrivalled. Poetry began to be
followed with success in the Netherlands, in the Dutch, Flemish,
and French languages; and even before the institution of the
Floral Games in France, Belgium possessed its chambers of rhetoric
(_rederykkamers_) which labored to keep alive the sacred flame
of poetry with more zeal than success. In the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, these societies were established in almost
every burgh of Flanders and Brabant; the principal towns possessing
several at once.

The arts in their several branches made considerable progress
in the Netherlands during this epoch. Architecture was greatly
cultivated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; most of
the cathedrals and town houses being constructed in that age.
Their vastness, solidity, and beauty of design and execution,
make them still speaking monuments of the stern magnificence
and finished taste of the times. The patronage of Philip the
Good, Charles the Rash, and Margaret of Austria, brought music
into fashion, and led to its cultivation in a remarkable degree.
The first musicians of France were drawn from Flanders; and other
professors from that country acquired great celebrity in Italy
for their scientific improvements in their delightful art.

Painting, which had languished before the fifteenth century,