and his jackass expedition to Bou- | town was especially disagreeable to me, logne. "He was received at Eglintoun, it is true," says the correspondent, "but what do you think was the reason? Because the English nobility were anxious to revenge upon his person (with some coups de lance) the checks which the grand homme' his uncle had inflicted on us in Spain."

and have only just hit on the reason why. Sweetest Juliana, you will never guess it: it is simply this, that I have not seen a single decent-looking woman in the whole place; they look all ugly, with coarse mouths, vulgar figures, mean mercantile faces; and so the traveller walking among them finds the pleasure of his walk excessively damped, and the impressions made upon him disagreeable.

In the Academy there are no pictures of merit; but sometimes a second-rate picture is as pleasing as the best, and one may pass an hour here very pleasantly. There is a room ap

This opinion is so general among the French, that they would laugh at you with scornful incredulity if you ventured to assert any other. Foy's history of the Spanish War does not, unluckily, go far enough. I have read a French history which hardly mentions the war in Spain, and calls the battle of Salamanca a French vic-propriated to Belgian artists, of which tory. You know how the other day, and in the teeth of all evidence, the French swore to their victory of Toulouse and so it is with the rest; and you may set it down as pretty certain, 1st, That only a few people know the real state of things in France, as to the matter in dispute between us; 2d, That those who do, keep the truth to themselves, and so it is as if it had never been.

These Belgians have caught up, and quite naturally, the French tone. We are perfide Albion with them still. Here is the Ghent paper, which declares that it is beyond a doubt that Louis Napoleon was sent by the English and Lord Palmerston; and though it states in another part of the journal (from English authority) that the Prince had never seen Lord Palmerston, yet the lie will remain uppermost the people and the editor will believe it to the end of time.

See to what a digression yonder little fellow in the tall hat has given rise! Let us make his picture, and have done with him.

I could not understand, in my walks about this place, which is certainly picturesque enough, and contains extraordinary charms in the shape of old gables, quaint spires, and broad shining canals- I could not at first comprehend why, for all this, the

I never saw the like: they are, like all the rest of the things in this country, miserable imitations of the French school-great nude Venuses, and Junos à la David, with the drawing left out.

BRUGES.

The change from vulgar Ghent, with its ugly women and coarse bustle, to this quiet, old, half-deserted, cleanly Bruges, was very pleasant. I have seen old men at Versailles, with shabby coats and pigtails, sunning themselves on the benches in the walls; they had seen better days, to be sure, but they were gentlemen still: and so we found, this morning, old dowager Bruges basking in the pleasant August sun, and looking if not prosperous, at least cheerful and wellbred. It is the quaintest and prettiest of all the quaint and pretty towns I have seen. A painter might spend months here, and wander from church to church, and admire old towers and pinnacles, tall gables, bright canals, and pretty little patches of green gar den and moss-grown wall, that reflect in the clear quiet water. Before the inn-window is a garden, from which in the early morning issues a most wonderful odor of stocks and wallflowers; next comes a road with trees of admirable green; numbers of little children are playing in this road

(the place is so clean that they may roll in it all day without soiling their pinafores), and on the other side of the trees are little old-fashioned, dumpy, whitewashed, red-tiled houses. A poorer landscape to draw never was known, nor a pleasanter to see- -the children especially, who are inordinately fat and rosy. Let it be remembered, too, that here we are out of the country of ugly women: the expression of the face is almost uniformly gentle and pleasing, and the figures of the women, wrapped in long black, monk-like cloaks and hoods, very picturesque. No wonder there are so many children : "The Guide-book" (omniscient Mr. Murray!) says there are fifteen thousand paupers in the town, and we know how such multiply. How the deuce do their children look so fat and rosy? By eating dirt-pies, I suppose. I saw a couple making a very nice savory one, and another employed in gravely sticking strips of stick betwixt the pebbles at the house-door, and so making for herself a stately garden. The men and women don't seem to have much more to do. There are a couple of tall chimneys at either suburb of the town, where no doubt manufactories are at work, but within the walls everybody seems decently idle.

have heard to-day "Suoni la Tromba," "Son Vergin Vezzosa," from "The Puritani," and other airs, and very badly they were played too; for such a great monster as a tower-bell cannot be expected to imitate Madame Grisi or even Signor Lablache. Other churches indulge in the same amusement, so that one may come here and live in melody all day or night, like the young woman in Moore's "Lalla Rookh."

In the matter of art, the chief attractions of Bruges are the pictures of Hemling, that are to be seen in the churches, the hospital, and the picture-gallery of the place. There are no more pictures of Rubens to be seen, and, indeed, in the course of a fortnight, one has had quite enough of the great man and his magnificent, swaggering canvases. What a difference is here with simple Hemling and the extraordinary creations of his pencil! The hospital is particularly rich in them; and the legend there is that the painter, who had served Charles the Bold in his war against the Swiss, and his last battle and defeat, wandered back wounded and penniless to Bruges, and herc | found cure and shelter.

This hospital is a noble and curious sight. The great hall is almost as it was in the twelfth century; it is spanned by Saxon arches, and lighted by a multiplicity of Gothic windows of all sizes; it is very lofty, clean, and perfectly well ventilated; a screen runs across the middle of the room, to divide the male from the female patients, and we were taken to examine each ward, where the poor people seemed happier than possibly they would have been in health and star

We have been, of course, abroad to visit the lions. The tower in the Grand Place is very fine, and the bricks of which it is built do not yield a whit in color to the best stone. The great building round this tower is very like the pictures of the Ducal Palace at Venice; and there is a long market area, with columns down the middle, from which hung shreds of rather lean-looking meat, that would do wonders under the hands of Catter-vation without it. Great yellow mole or Haghe. In the tower there blankets were on the iron beds, the is a chime of bells that keep ringing linen was scrupulously clean, glitterperpetually. They not only play ing pewter-jugs and goblets stood by tunes of themselves, and every quarter the side of each patient, and they of an hour, but an individual per- were provided with godly books (to forms selections from popular operas judge from the binding), in which on them at certain periods of the several were reading at leisure. Honmorning, afternoon, and evening. Il est old comfortable nuns, in queer

dresses of blue, black, white, and flannel, were bustling through the room, attending to the wants of the sick. I saw about a dozen of these kind women's faces; one was young all were healthy and cheerful. One came with bare blue arms and a great pile of linen from an out-house-such a grange as Cedric the Saxon might have given to a guest for the night. A couple were in a laboratory, a tall, bright, clean room, 500 years old at least. "We saw you were not very religious," said one of the old ladies, with a red, wrinkled, good-humored face, by your behavior yesterday in chapel." And yet we did not laugh and talk as we used at college, but were profoundly affected by the scene that we saw there. It was a fête-day: a mass of Mozart was sung in the evening-not well sung, and yet so exquisitely tender and melodious, that it brought tears into our eyes. There were not above twenty people in the church: all, save three or four, were women in long black cloaks. I took them for nuns at first. They were, however, the common people of the town, very poor indeed, doubtless, for the priest's box that was brought round was not added to by most of them, and their contributions were but two-cent pieces, five of these go to a penny; but we know the value of such, and can tell the exact worth of a poor woman's mite! The box-bearer did not seem at first willing to accept our donation we were strangers and heretics; however, I held out my hand, and he came perforce as it were. Indeed it had only a franc in it but que voulez-vous? I had been drinking a bottle of Rhine" wine that day, and how was I to afford more ? The Rhine wine is dear in this country, and costs four francs a bottle.

Well, the service proceeded. Twenty poor women, two Englishmen, four ragged beggars, cowering on the steps; and there was the priest at the altar, in a great robe of gold and damask, two little boys in white sur

plices serving him, holding his robe as he rose and bowed, and the moneygatherer swinging his censer, and filling the little chapel with smoke. The music pealed with wonderful sweetness; you could see the prim white heads of the nuns in their gallery. The evening light streamed down upon old statues of saints and carved brown stalls, and lighted up the head of the golden-haired Magdalen in a picture of the entombment of Christ. Over the gallery, and, as it were, a kind protectress to the poor below, stood the statue of the Virgin.

III. — WATERLOO.

Ir is, my dear, the happy privilege of your sex in England, to quit the dinner-table after the wine-bottles have once or twice gone round it, and you are thereby saved (though, to be sure, I can't tell what the ladies do up stairs) you are saved two or three hours' excessive dulness, which the men are obliged to go through.

I ask any gentleman who reads this the letters to my Juliana being written with an eye to publication to remember especially how many times, how many hundred times, how many thousand times, in his hearing, the battle of Waterloo has been discussed after dinner, and to call to mind how cruelly he has been bored by the discussion. "Ah, it was lucky for us that the Prussians came up! says one little gentleman, looking particularly wise and ominous. Hang the Prussians!" (or, perhaps, something stronger, the Prussians!") says a stout old major on halfpay. "We beat the French without them, sir, as beaten them we always have! We were thundering down the hill of Belle Alliance, sir, at the backs of them, and the French were crying

Sauve qui peut' long before the Prussians ever touched them!" And so the battle opens, and for many

I thought to myself, considering the above things, what a fine thing it will be in after-days to say that I have been to Brussels, and never seen the field of Waterloo; indeed, that I am such a philosopher as not to care a fig about the battle-nay, to regret, rather, that when Napoleon came back, the British Government had not spared their men and left him alone.

"

mortal hours, amid rounds of claret, | time of peace (and this strange fact rages over and over again. is vouched for by every person of every nation), and being asked wherefore the King of Holland had been ousted from his throne, replied at once, 66 Parceque c'étoit un voleur: for which accusation I believe there is some show of reason, his Majesty having laid hands on much Belgian property before the lamented outbreak which cost him his crown. A vast deal of laughing and roaring passed between these two worldly But this pitch of philosophy was people and the postilion whom they unattainable. This morning, after called "baron," and I thought, no having seen the Park, the fashionable doubt that this talk was one of the boulevard, the pictures, the cafés many jokes that my companions were having sipped, I say, the sweets of in the habit of making. But not so: every flower that grows in this para- the postilion was an actual baron, the dise of Brussels, quite weary of the bearer of an ancient name, the desplace, we mounted on a Namur dili-cendant of gallant gentlemen. Good gence, and jingled off at four miles an heavens! what would Mrs. Trollope hour for Waterloo. say to see his lordship here? His father the old baron had dissipated the family fortune, and here was this young nobleman, at about five-andforty, compelled to bestride a clattering Flemish stallion, and bump over dusty pavements at the rate of five miles an hour. But see the beauty of high blood with what a calm grace the man of family accommodates himself to fortune! Far from being cast down, his lordship met his fate like a man: he swore and laughed the whole of the journey, and as we changed horses, condescended to partake of half a pint of Louvain beer, to which the farmer treated him-indeed the worthy rustic treated me to a glass too.

The road is very neat and agreeable: the Forest of Soignies here and there interposes pleasantly, to give your vehicle a shade: the country, as usual, is vastly fertile and well cultivated. A farmer and the conducteur were my companions in the imperial, and, could I have understood their conversation, my dear, you should have had certainly a report of it. The jargon which they talked was, indeed, most queer and puzzling - French, I believe, strangely hashed up and pronounced, for here and there one could catch a few words of it. Now and anon, however, they condescended to speak in the purest French they could muster; and, indeed, nothing is more curious than to hear the French of the country. You can't understand why all the people insist upon speaking it so badly. I asked the conductor if he had been at the battle; he burst out laughing like a philosopher, as he was, and said, "Pas si bête." I asked the farmer whether his contributions were lighter now than in King William's time, and lighter than those in the time of the Emperor? He vowed that in wartime he had not more to pay than in

Much delight and instruction have I had in the course of the journey from my guide, philosopher, and friend, the author of " Murray's Handbook." He has gathered together, indeed, a store of information, and must, to make his single volume, have gutted many hundreds of guide-books. How the Continental ciceroni must hate him, whoever he is! Every English party I saw had this infallible red book in their hands, and gained a vast deal of his