The new building is very magnificent; a new street having been formed to open at a suitable site for it, one side of which it occupies exclusively. The centre of the front, projects in the form of a wide semi-circle, so that carriages drive right under the building to set down their company at the foot of the grand staircase. Besides the theatre itself, there is a suite of halls for concerts, capable of containing two thousand persons, and the entire is finished internally in the style of Louis XIV, with a prodigality of colours, gilding, and ornamental carving that is quite surprising. It is certainly the most beautiful theatre I have seen, as well as one of the most spacious. The “_spectacle_” and the opera are still amongst those necessaries in the economy of life in Belgium, which late dinner hours and fastidious taste have not as yet interfered with. Ghent has long been eminent for its successful cultivation of music. A few years since, the _chefs d’orchestre_ in the four principal theatres in the kingdom were all natives of Ghent, and the names of Verheyen, Ermel and Angelet, all born in the same place, are familiar to every amateur of the science. The _Société de St. Cecile_, a musical association, is the most eminent in the Netherlands, and at a concert at Brussels in 1837, where all the musicians of the chief cities of the kingdom competed for a prize; the first honours, two golden medals were given by acclamation to those of Ghent. The print works of M. De Smet de Naeyer are situated in the _Faubourg de Bruges_, and, like almost all in the Netherlands, exhibit no division of labour; the cotton being spun, woven, and printed upon the same premises. In the latter department, their productions are of a very ordinary description, and their designs in a very inferior class of art. The machinery was partly French and partly Belgian, of a cumbrous and antiquated construction, compared with that in use in England; but, as the recent improvements in Great Britain have all been conceived with a view to the speediest and cheapest production to meet a most extensive demand, their introduction into Belgium, where the market is so extremely circumscribed, would only be an augmentation of expense, without any correspondent advantage. The works were idle at the moment of our visit.