In works of art, the burghers of Bruges seem to have been generous as well as ambitious in adorning their city, so long as its municipal affluence placed it within their power to gratify their tastes. The churches, are, therefore, rich in works of the _early_ Flemish school--the Van Eycks and Hans Memling, and Pourbus and their collaborators and successors: but at the period when the new Flemish school had arisen, with Otto Vennius, and attained its eminence under Rubens and Vandyk, Bruges had already suffered her decline, the sun of her prosperity had gone down, and she possesses no works of their pencil. The chief depositaries of paintings in the city, are the church of St. Sauveur, the chapel of the Hospital of St. John, and the Gallery of the Museum near the Quai du Miroir. The three collections present precisely the same array of names, and the same features of art, insipid and passionless faces, figures harsh and incorrect in drawing, finished with that elaborate care which seems to have been at all times the characteristic of the schools of both Flanders and Holland, and gaudy, inharmonious colours, upon a brilliant and generally gilded ground, in the Byzantine style. Except as mere antiquities, these pictures have but little interest to any except the mere historian of the art. The collection in St. Saveur I did not see, as it had been removed in consequence of a recent fire, but it seems from the lists to be rather extensive. That in the _Museum_ is numerous, but monotonous and tiresome, for the reasons I have mentioned, though Sir Joshua Reynolds speaks with high approbation of some beauties, I presume, it requires the eye of an artist to discern them. The gallery here contains, also, a statue, by Calloigne, a native artist, of John Van Eyck, the painter, called “John of Bruges,” to whom has been ascribed the invention of painting in oil. His claim to the discovery is, of course, incorrect, as the mummy cases of Egypt sufficiently attest, but his merit as one of those, who, earliest and most successfully applied it to the purposes of art, is sufficiently indicated by a glance at his pictures, and their comparison with the inferior productions of his contemporaries in Italy.