the study of Belgian landscape. Hitherto from Brussels, or for
that matter from Bruges and Ostend, the country, though studded at
frequent intervals with cities and big towns, has been curiously
and intensely rural in the tracts that lie between; but now, as we
descend the steep incline into the valley of the Meuse, we enter
on a scene of industrial activity which, if never quite as bad as
our own Black Country at home, is sufficiently spoilt and
irritating to all who love rustic grace. The redeeming point, as
always, is that infinitely superior good taste which presents us,
in the midst of coal-mines and desolation, not with our own
unspeakably squalid Sheffields or Rotherhams, but with a queenly
city, with broad and handsome streets, with a wealth of public
gardens, and with many stately remnants of the Renaissance and
Middle Time. It is possible in Liege to forget--or rather
impossible to recall--the soiled and grimy country that stretches
from its gates in the direction of Seraing. Even under the sway of
the Spanish tyranny this was an independent state under the rule
of a Bishop Prince, who was also an Elector of the Holy Roman
Empire. Its original cathedral, indeed, has vanished, like those
at Cambrai and Bruges, in the insensate throes of the French
Revolution; and the existing church of St. Paul, though dating in
part from the thirteenth century, and a fine enough building in
its way, is hardly the kind of structure that one would wish to
associate with the seat of a bishopric that is still so historic,
and was formerly so important and even quasi-regal. Here, however,
you should notice, just as in the great neighbour church of St.
Jacques, the remarkable arabesque-pattern painting of the
severies of the vault, and the splendour of the sixteenth-century
glass. St. Jacques, I think, on the whole is the finer church of
the two, and remarkable for the florid ornament of its spandrels,