Instead of the narrow, dingy passages which occur in cities of similar antiquity and renown, there is an air peculiarly gay and imposing in the broad and cheerful streets of Bruges; its streets enlivened by long lines of lindens and oriental plane trees, and traversed by canals, not sluggish and stagnant, but flowing with an active current through the city. Upon these, the wealthier mansions open to the rear, a little ornamented “pleasance” separating them from the river, laid out in angular walks, and ornamented with evergreens, clipped _en quenouille_, and here and there a statue or an antique vase. The squares maintain the same character of dignity and gravity, overshadowed with “old ancestral trees,” and flanked by their municipal halls and towers--the monuments of a time when Bruges was the Tyre of Western Europe, and her Counts and citizens combined the enterprize and wealth of the merchant with the fiery bearing of the soldier. These edifices, too, exhibit in their style something of the sturdy pride of their founders, presenting less of ornament and decoration than of domineering height and massive solidity, and striking the visitor rather by their strength than their elegance. On the whole, Bruges reminded me strongly of Pisa, and some of the towns of northern Italy, whose history and decline are singularly similar to its own. The air of its edifices and buildings is the same, and there is around it a similar appearance of desertion rather than decay--though in Bruges the retirement and solitude which was, till recently, its characteristic, has been much invaded by the concourse of strangers whom the railroad brings hourly to visit it. Bruges, in the olden time, was indebted for its political importance to its being the most ancient capital of the Low Countries, and one of the residences of the old “Foresters of Flanders,” and of that illustrious line of sovereign Counts and Dukes, whose dynasty extends almost from Charlemagne to Charles V, and whose exploits enrich the annals of the crusades and form the theme of the romancers and minstrels of the middle ages. Of the palaces of these stormy potentates, scarcely a vestige now remains, except a few dilapidated walls of the “Princenhof,” in which Charles le Téméraire espoused Margaret of York, the sister of our Edward IV, and in which, also, his interesting daughter, Mary of Valois, Duchess of Burgundy, married Maximilian of Austria, son to Frederick IV--that “portentous alliance,” which subsequently brought the Netherlands under the dominion of the Emperor, and consigned them, on the abdication of Charles V, to the tender mercies of the sanguinary Philip of Spain. At her nuptials, the Duke of Bavaria acted as proxy for the imperial bridegroom, and according to the custom of the period, passed the night with the young duchess, each reposing in full dress, with a sword placed between them, and in the presence of four armed archers of the guard.