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 Adriatic," there is yet certainly nothing monotonous in her monotone of mellow red-brick; and certainly nothing so dilapidated, and tattered, and altogether poverty-stricken as one stumbles against in Venice in penetrating every narrow lane, and in sailing up almost every canal. Of Venice we may perhaps say, what Byron said of Greece, that "Hers is the loveliness in death That parts not quite with parting breath"; whilst in Bruges we recognize gladly, not death or decay at all, but the serene and gracious comeliness of a dignified and vital old age.