churches. Rood-screens of this exact sort are almost limited to
Belgium, though there is one, now misplaced in the west end of the
nave, and serving as an organ-loft, in the church of St. Gery at
Cambrai--another curious link between French and Belgian Flanders.
Dixmude (in Flemish Diksmuide), nine and a half miles south from
Nieuport, is an altogether bigger and more important place, with a
larger and more important church, of St. Nicholas, to match. My
recollection of this last, on a Saturday afternoon of heavy
showers towards the close of March, is one of a vast interior
thronged with men and women in the usual dismal, black Flemish
cloaks, kneeling in confession, or waiting patiently for their
turn to confess, in preparation for the Easter Mass. Here the best
feature, till lately, was the glorious Flamboyant rood-screen,
recalling those at Albi and the church of Brou, in France; and
remarkable in Belgium as one of the very few examples of its sort
(there is, or was, another in St. Pierre, at Louvain) of so early
a period, in a land where rood-screens, as a body, are generally
much later in date.

It is difficult, in dealing with Flanders, to avoid a certain
amount of architectural description, for architecture, after all,
is the chief attraction of the country, save perhaps in Ghent and
Bruges, where we have also noble pictures. Even those who do not
care to study this architecture in detail will be gratified to
stroll at leisure through the dim vastness of the great Flemish
churches, where the eye is satisfied everywhere with the wealth of
brass and iron work, and where the Belgian passion for wood-
carving displays itself in lavish prodigality. Such wealth,
indeed, of ecclesiastical furniture you will hardly find elsewhere
in Western Europe--font covers of hammered brass, like those at