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. Perhaps there is no big city in the world--and Bruges,
though it has shrunk pitiably, like Ypres, from its former great
estate in the Middle Ages, has still more than forty thousand
souls--that remains from end to end, in every alley, and square,
and street, so wholly unspoilt and untouched by what is bad in the
modern spirit, or that presents so little unloveliness and squalor
in its more out-of-the-way corners as Bruges. Bruges, of course,
like Venice, and half a dozen towns in Holland, is a strangely
amphibious city that is intersected in every direction, though
certainly less persistently than Venice, by a network of stagnant
canals. On the other hand, if it never rises to the splendour of
the better parts of Venice--the Piazza and the Grand Canal--and
lacks absolutely that charm of infinitely varied, if somewhat
faded or even shabby, colour that characterizes the "Queen of the