marvellous library of the Regent gone to feed the fires of sacrilege or enrich the galleries of the uttermost parts of the earth, though its wealth is no more and throngs of finely clad burghers and merchants no longer enrich its winding streets with the pageant of a wedded Mediævalism and Renaissance, out of this ecclesiastical aggrandisement has come in these later days a new honour to Malines; for when war and pillage again swept it with the flames of hell, it was the Cardinal of Malines, Archbishop Mercier, who dared to stand forth and defy the spoiler, while shaming his too-cautious ecclesiastical superior, weighing, vacillating, counting costs and profits in the midst of his buzzing curia. The Heart of Europe, pierced by the sword and shedding the life-blood that had coursed for a thousand years through the arteries of the world, knew that the hour of the eternal question had come, that the clean division between right and wrong had been cut by the sword, that once more the Voice had gone forth: “He that is not with Me is against Me,” and that there was no longer place on earth for the emasculate, the neuter, in the catchword parlance of the time, the neutral. Peter shuddered and hesitated on the throne of the Fisherman; great nations outside the widening ring of fire counted the cost and dreamed day-dreams of arbitration and pacification, but once again Malines spoke, as in the past, with the tongue of the past--and of the future. Mercier of Malines spoke for God and his own people, and for the righteousness that is eternal, as four centuries ago spoke Margaret of Malines. XI THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTERS The history, the principles, the motives, the methods of that mode of art which expresses itself in pictorial form are involved in more error and misrepresentation than happens in the case of any of its allies. For this the nineteenth century, and particularly the Teutonic nineteenth century, with its inability to understand art in any form save that of music, is chiefly responsible. Every effort has been made to isolate it as an independent form of art, to confine it to “easel painting” on panel or canvas, or to wall decorations conceived after the same fashion and on the same lines, to reduce it to certain schools and individuals and localities; in a word, to make it a highly specialised form of personal expression, like lyric poetry or theological heresy. This is to miss its essential character and deny its primary function.