of Flanders, by nature so tame and devoid of poetry, worked out for
itself an original existence, with characteristic manners and customs
which bear no signs of servile imitation. Art stripped off its
ideality and produced form alone. We may seek in vain for plastic
grace, the swing of comedy, dramatic action, musical genius, or the
bold flight of ode and epic. On the other hand, the people are fertile
in discoveries, and trained to scientific discussions which demand
time and the midnight oil. All things bear the ear-mark of temporal
enjoyment. There men look exclusively to the thing that is: their
thoughts are so scrupulously bent on supplying the wants of this life
that they have never risen, in any direction, above the level of this
present earth. The sole idea they have ever conceived of the future is
that of a thrifty, prosaic statecraft: their revolutionary vigor came
from a domestic desire to live as they liked, with their elbows on the
table, and to take their ease under the projecting roofs of their own
porches.

The consciousness of well-being and the spirit of independence which
comes of prosperity begot in Flanders, sooner than elsewhere, that
craving for liberty which, later, permeated all Europe. Thus the
compactness of their ideas, and the tenacity which education grafted
on their nature made the Flemish people a formidable body of men in
the defence of their rights. Among them nothing is half-done,--neither
houses, furniture, dikes, husbandry, nor revolutions; and they hold a
monopoly of all that they undertake. The manufacture of linen, and
that of lace, a work of patient agriculture and still more patient
industry, are hereditary like their family fortunes. If we were asked
to show in human form the purest specimen of solid stability, we could
do no better than point to a portrait of some old burgomaster,
capable, as was proved again and again, of dying in a commonplace way,