The municipal collections of art are deposited in the museum and picture gallery in the Palais des Beaux Arts, formerly the vice-regal residence of the Austrian governors. In one wing of the building, called the Palais d’Industrie, are deposited models of machinery, agricultural instruments, and inventions of all kinds applicable to manufactures. The collection is costly and extensive, and cannot fail to exercise a beneficial influence in the education of mechanics. The main galleries of the palace are filled with the national pictures, which amount to between three and four hundred. The description of a painting is scarcely more intelligible or satisfactory than the description of an overture. Amongst the collection are a few of considerable merit, but the vast majority are of the most ordinary description. There are a few by Rubens and Vandyck, not of the first order, some by Breughel, Cuyp, Gerard Dow, and the chiefs of that school; a multitude by the Crayers and Van Oorts and Vander Weydes, whose works one meets in every Flemish chapel, and a number of the early painters of the Netherlands, in which, I confess, I am not connoisseur enough to discover anything very attractive beyond their antiquity and curiosity as specimens of the feeble efforts of art in its infancy. Under the same roof is the magnificent Library, begun by the Dukes of Burgundy so far back as the fourteenth century, and enriched by every subsequent sovereign of the Netherlands, till its treasures now amount to 150,000 volumes of printed books and 15,000 manuscripts; amongst which are numbers whose pedigree through their various possessors is full of historical interest, and some which belonged to the library of Philip the Hardy, in 1404, and described in the “_Inventoire des livres et roumans de feu Monseigneur_ (_Philip le Hardi_), _a qui Dieu pardonne, que maistre Richart le Conte, barbier de feu le dict Seigneur, a euzen garde_.” Its chief treasures it owes, however, to Philip the Good, the Lorenzo de Medicis of the Low Countries, who attracted to his court such geniuses as Oliver de la March, Monstrelet, Philip de Commines, the chroniclers and men of learning of his time, and kept constantly in his employment the most able “clerks,” “_escripvains_” and illuminators, engaged in the preparation of volumes for his “librarie,” and having united all the provinces of the Netherlands under his dominion, he collected at Brussels the manuscripts of the Counts of Flanders, in addition to his own. The identical copy of the Cyropedia of Xenophon, which he had transcribed for the study of his impetuous son, Charles le Téméraire, and which accompanied him to the disastrous field of Morat, is still amongst the deposits in this superb collection.