than it might have been, had we seen it under the influence of light and sunshine. Antwerp like all its fellow cities in Belgium, boasts an origin of obscure antiquity, so remote as the fifth or sixth century, it is said,--but at all events in the tenth, it was of sufficient importance to constitute a Marquisate for Godfrey of Bouillon, the hero of Tasso, and the King of Jerusalem, the unexpected arrival of whose followers from the Holy Land, in January 1100, has been commemorated in a festival still observed by the women of Antwerp, as the Vroukens-Avond, or the _Ladies’ Eve_, in remembrance of the domestic fêtes which welcomed their return. Two hundred years after, it was annexed along with the province of Lower Lorraine, to the Duchy of Flanders, and along with it passed successively under the dominion of Burgundy, Germany and Spain, sharing in all the vicissitudes and disasters which befel the rest of the Netherlands, under their various dynasties. Antwerp contests with Holland and Germany, the glory of the discovery of printing. Little books of devotion, printed there, from solid blocks, early in the fourteenth century, are still in existence; numbers of volumes in moveable types, bear its name and the date of 1476; and during the sixteenth century, in the days of Plantin, it was one of the most extensive seats of printing in Europe, all the productions of its press, and especially its classics, being in the highest repute. The original citadel and fortifications were erected by Philip II, which were strengthened and enlarged in the reign of Charles V, at a time when Antwerp was one of the first commercial cities in Europe. Its manufactures of linen and silk were then exported to every part of the world; its woollen trade was the parent of the same manufacture in Great Britain, and its local historians, perhaps with some exaggeration, describe its commerce as so flourishing, that the population supported by it, exceeded one hundred thousand souls, (though one is puzzled to discover where they found accommodation within its walls) and fifty thousand sailors and travellers on the river and in the faubourgs; and Scribanius declares that he has seen 2500 vessels in the Scheldt at a time, of which five hundred daily entered the river, whilst two thousand lay at anchor before the city; but, “_pour être témoin véridique, il ne suffit pas toujours d’être témoin oculaire_.” It was in this era of its splendour, that one of its merchants entertaining Charles V, at a banquet, kindled a fire of cinnamon, then a costly rarity, with the Emperor’s bond for two millions of florins, observing, “that the honor of having such a guest at his table, was infinitely more precious than the gold.” Its prosperity was, however, annihilated a century later, when at the treaty of Munster, which closed the Thirty years’ war in 1648, Holland had sufficient influence to obtain the closing of the Scheldt. For