An almost precipitous street, appropriately called “Rue Montagne de la Cour,” rises in a straight line from the lowest level of the ancient town to the hill on which the new one is situated, which is filled with the best and most showy shops in Brussels; jewellers, printsellers, confectioners and modistes, and crowded at all hours of the day with carriages and fashionable loungers. At the bottom of this steep acclivity, is the Place de la Monnaie, where stands the theatre, in which the actual insurrection commenced in 1830, when the audience, inflamed by the music and declamation of the Muette de Portici, and inspired by the estro of Masaniello, rushed into the street and proceeded at once to demolish the residence of the minister, M. van Maanen. Turning a corner from this, one finds himself suddenly in the midst of the antique square in which stands the Hôtel de Ville, and the other principal municipal edifices of the past age--the _forum_ of ancient Brabant, as the Place de Monnaie is of the modern. It was in this and in the sombre old mansions that are to be found in the precincts around it, that the pride of democracy appears to have delighted in “recording in lofty stone” its own magnificence, and lavished their public wealth upon the towers of the Town Hall, the most imposing monument of the popular power. But, independently of its democratic associations, the Hôtel de Ville of Brussels was the scene of the most extraordinary episode that has ever been recorded in the chronicles of kings;--it was in the grand hall of the Hôtel de Ville that Charles V. wearied with the crown of a monarch, laid it aside to assume the cowl of a monk, and took his departure from the throne of an empire to die, a maniac, in the cell of a monastery. It was from one of the windows of the same building that the ferocious Duke of Alva looked on, in person, at the execution of two of the purest patriots of their own or any subsequent age--Lamoral, Count Egmont, and Philip de Montmorency, Count Horn--the first and most illustrious martyrs of the Reformation in the Netherlands. During the reign of terror under Philip II., Brussels was the grand scene of Alva’s atrocities and of his successors’ incapacity. It was in the little square of the Petit Sablon, that the protestant confederates assembled to draw up their famous remonstrance to Margaret of Parma, the sister and vice-queen of the bigotted tyrant, on the occasion of presenting which, by the hands of de Bredérode, the unlucky exclamation of “the beggars,” (_Gueux_) escaped from the incautious lips of the Count de Berlayment, in whispering his counsel to the grand-duchess to reject their prayer, a word which fell like a blister, and was adopted, at once, as the title and the sting of the protestant conjuration.