Here and there upon the quays and in the narrower streets, there are to be found the gloomy old residences of the “Men of Ghent,” now converted into inns or ware-rooms, with their sharp tilted roofs, high stepped gables, abutting on the street, fantastic chimneys, and mullioned windows, sunk deep into the walls. And turning some sudden corner in a narrow passage obstructed by lumbering waggons, drawn by oxen, one finds himself in front of some huge old tower, or venerable belfry, covered with gothic sculpture, and stretching up to the sky till he has to bend back his head to descry the summit of it. One singular old building on the Quai aux Herbes, remarkable for its profusion of Saxon arches and stone carvings, was the Hall of the Watermen, whose turbulent insurrection under John Lyon, is detailed with quaint circumstantiality in the pages of Froissart. But in the main, the streets of Ghent are lively and attractive, and its squares, spacious and planted with trees, forming a striking contrast to the melancholy brick and mortar buildings, that compose the manufacturing towns of England. Here too, as in Manchester and Leeds, the population seem all alive and active, but instead of the serious and important earnestness which one sees in every countenance in Lancashire, the Gantois seems to go about his affairs with cheerfulness and alacrity, as if he was less employed on business than amusement. The canals are filled with heavily laden barges, and the quays with long narrow waggons of most primitive construction, into which they unload their cargoes; whilst the number of handsome private carriages, that one sees in every thoroughfare, bespeak, at once, the wealth and refinement of the population. The shops are exceedingly good though not particularly moderate in their charges, and I was somewhat surprised to see as an attraction on the sign boards at the doors of the drapers and modistes, the announcement that _Scotch_ and _English goods_ were to be had within. Altogether the combination of antique singularity with modern comfort, commercial bustle, wealth, gaiety, cleanliness, and vivacity, which is to be seen at Ghent, cannot fail to strike the most hurried traveller, and I doubt much whether it is to be found in equal perfection, in any other city of the continent of equal extent.