In public buildings, Namur, has nothing to exhibit, except two moderate churches: one of them, the Cathedral, contains some paintings, and the tomb of the gallant Don John of Austria, the natural son of Charles V, Barbara Blomberg of Ratisbon, who assumed the credit of being his mother, in order, it is said, to conceal a more illustrious parentage. Don John, who, as the grand admiral at Lepanto, combined, in his own person, the functions of a naval as well as a military commander, added to both the genius of a diplomatist, and was invested with the government of the Low Countries after the pacification of Ghent. He, in person, obtained possession of the citadel of Namur, by going thither under pretence of visiting the Queen of Navarre, Margaret of Valois, who was enjoying the gaiety of Spa, and being permitted to walk on the glacis, and finally to view the interior, by the young son of the governor, in the absence of his father, he took the opportunity to entrench his immediate guard as a garrison in the name of his brother of Spain, who the next year rewarded his bravery, by causing him to be poisoned, to avoid a marriage, which he apprehended between the hero of Lepanto and Queen Elizabeth of England. He died at the camp of Bongy, a short distance from Namur, in 1578, when only thirty-three years of age. The other church, that of St. Loup, is overlaid with a profusion of decorations of all descriptions, paintings, carved confessionals and gilded altars, its floor is of variegated marble, the columns which sustain the vaults of the roof are polished porphyry or red granite, with square plinths, interposed between each tambour in the shaft, and the ceiling which is of solid white stone, is laboriously chased from end to end in a multitude of florid devices, so accurately raised out and under cut, that the whole looks like a Chinese sculpture in ivory. Tradition says, the carving of the entire roof, was the work of one individual monk of the Jesuits, by whom the church was erected.