lightly poised figures, and pure and lovely faces. Namur,
strangely enough, has really nothing of antiquity outside the
doors of its Archaeological Museum, but is worth a visit if only
for the pleasure of promenading streets which, if almost wholly
modern, are unusually clean and bright. Tirlemont, again, has two
old churches that will not delay you long, though Notre Dame de
Lac has remarkably fine confessionals of the dawn of the
seventeenth century, and though the splendid brass-work of the
font and baptistery lectern at St. Germains would alone be worth a
visit; but Leau, for which Tirlemont is the junction, is so quaint
and curious a little town, and comes so much in the guise of a
pleasant discovery--since Baedeker barely mentions it--that, even
apart from its perfect wealth of wood and brass work in the fine
thirteenth-century church of St. Leonhard, it might anyhow be
thought to justify a visit to this little visited corner of South
Brabant. I do not know that the brass-work could be easily matched
elsewhere: the huge standard candelabrum to the north of the
altar, with its crowning Crucifixion; the lectern, with its
triumphant eagle and prostrate dragon; the font, with its cover,
and the holy-water stoup almost as big as a small font (in
Brittany I have seen them as big as a bath); and the beautiful
brass railings that surround the splendid Tabernacle that was
executed in 1552 by Cornelius de Vriendt, the brother of the
painter Frans Floris, and that towers high into the vaulting to a
height of fifty-two feet. One realizes more completely in a quiet
village church like this the breadth and intensity of the wave of
artistic impulse that swept through the Lowlands in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries than is possible in half a dozen hurried
visits to a picture gallery at Antwerp or Brussels. Finally Hal,
to conclude our list of minor places, has a grand fourteenth-