the surrounding plain, that it is said that it is possible from
the strangely isolated hill of Cassel, which lies about eighteen
miles away to the west, just over the border, in France, on a
really clear day--I have only climbed it myself, unluckily, in a
fog of winter mist--to distinguish in a single view, by merely
turning the head, the clustering spires of Laon, the white chalk
cliffs of Kent, and this vast pile of building, like a ship at
sea, that seems to lie at anchor in the heart of the "sounding
plain." Nothing, perhaps, in Europe is so strangely significant of
vanished greatness--not even Rome, with its shattered Forum, or
Venice, with a hundred marble palaces--as this huge fourteenth-
century building, with a facade that is four hundred and thirty-
six feet long, and with its lofty central tower, that was built
for the pride and need of Ypres, and as a market for the barter of
its priceless linens, at a time when Ypres numbered a population
of two hundred thousand souls (almost as big as Leicester at the
present day), and was noisy with four thousand busy looms; whereas
now it has but a beggarly total of less than seventeen thousand
souls (about as big as Guildford), and is only a degree less
sleepy than Malines or Bruges-la-Morte. Ypres, again, like Arras,
has lent its name to commerce, if diaper be really rightly derived
from the expression "linen of Ypres." The Cloth Hall fronts on to
the Grande Place, and, indeed, forms virtually one side of it; and
behind, in the Petite Place, is the former cathedral of St.
Martin. 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: