In his _Journey in the Year 1793 through Flanders, Brabant and Germany_, the Rev. C. Este says: “The town is tolerably well built as to the walls of the houses; but their windows and doors are after the manner of the French. The lower windows are also deformed with iron bars, offensive even beyond the eye, as implying something wrong in the place, either from real danger, or from false fear. “The buildings at Bruxelles compare in one point advantageously with Paris. For the houses having fewer floors, but three or four, generally have but one family under one roof.... The places for a traveller to see, if he has time, are the Archduke’s Château de Schoemburg (in the village of Lack), and the villa of M. Walkiers the banker. They are not half an hour’s drive from Bruxelles and close to one another; besides the way is through the _Allée Verte_, those beautiful vistas of elms and limes, where the canal goes to join the Scheldt.... “The Archduke’s _château_ is a modern building, Ionic without, Corinthian within, with two fronts of 260 feet, the depth 150, with a central portico at the entrance and a bow in the centre behind. The effect of the building at a distance is gay and imposing enough; when close to it the effect is maimed by bad figures at the top of the building, and the pediment of the portico being filled by a clock, which seems fit only where the character of the building is appropriate, as at Inigo’s church at Covent Garden, to simplicity and use. The gate of approach, loaded with bad ornaments, cupids and what not, is at once lofty and trifling, elaborate and dull. “In the internal distribution the best rooms are forty feet square—a dining-room 52 by 40—a chapel 27 by 22—and the state room a circle 54 feet in diameter; the dome is the ceiling of the room, and midway between the bottom and the top there is a small gallery on twelve Corinthian pillars. The floors in the other rooms are inlaid mixture, angular shapes of oak, mahogany and petrified cedar. In the circular room the floor is shewy, formed of various marbles. There are five windows, which should have five looking-glasses opposite—there are but two, with three glass doors, but not looking-glass. The looking-glasses are the manufacture of Venice. And these, eight feet by six, are among the largest ever blown there. For that is the Venetian process; not by the mould as in France and England. “There are few objects of art. The only pictures are four large ones by De Lance of Antwerp. They are mythological subjects; of course, the worst in the world. Le Roi of Namur supplied the five feet full length of the Virgin in the chapel. It is not bad statuary, for it has, which is very rare, thought and emotion.