In order to gain a proper conception of the Upper Town, one of the best-arranged in Europe, you must take the Place Royale and the Ancienne Cour (just below it) as your starting-point. The Place, the Park, and the streets about them were all laid out, under Austrian rule, at the end of the 18th century (1774) by the architect Guimard, who thus made Brussels into the handsome town we now see it. Turning to the R. from the Place Royale, towards the Rue de la Régence, you come first to the gateway of a courtyard, guarded by sentinels. Disregarding these, push past them into the court as if the place belonged to you. The quadrangle you have entered is the site of the old Palace of the Dukes of Brabant, for which the present building, known as the =Ancienne Cour=, was substituted by the Austrian Stadtholders in 1731 after the great fire. The first building to your L. is occupied by the Royal Museum and Library. The portion of the building at the end of the court, in a semi-circular recess, contains the MODERN PICTURE GALLERY (open daily from 10 to 4, free). In this gallery are collected the chief works of the modern Belgian School of Painters, which the tourist should not omit to study, but a full description of which lies wholly outside the scope of these Guide Books. [This =modern Belgian School= was started in Antwerp, after the Revolution of 1830. It answered at first to the romantic movement in France (headed by Delaroche, Géricault, and others:) but the Belgian painters dealt mainly in historical pictures drawn from the struggles for liberty in their own country. The most distinguished of these “romantic” Belgian artists were Louis Gallait and Edouard de Bièfve, whose chief national works are to be seen in this gallery. Though they belong to a type which now strikes us as mannered and artificial, not to say insipid, they may help to impress historical facts on the spectator’s memory. A very different side of the national movement will meet us at Antwerp. The later Belgian School has been gradually swamped by Parisian tendencies.]