As the Heart of Europe gradually became parcelled out between the great adjoining empires, each taking its colour more or less from the central influences, while in every instance contributing something in its turn to the sum that made up the varying greatness of both, the essential qualities of the original Belgæ seemed to concentrate in the little province of Flanders, which, during the whole of the Middle Ages, played a part in Europe strikingly disproportionate to its size, which was less than half that of the State of Connecticut, though it contained over 1,200,000 people and counted cities like Ghent with 250,000 population, Ypres with 200,000, Bruges and Courtrai with 100,000 each. At the same time London could boast only 35,000 citizens. In trade, industry, wealth, culture, and the standard of living Flanders was far in advance of the rest of northern Europe, while it was marked by a perfect passion for liberty not only for the state but for each individual member thereof. Every portion of the land we are considering made its own contribution, early or late, to the great sum of mediævalism, but it would be impossible to consider, even superficially, the gifts of Champagne, Burgundy, the Rhineland. This book does not assume to be a history, it is only a sequence of notes on the lost or imperilled art of the Heart of Europe, with just so much of history as may serve to suggest what lay behind and gave this art its peculiar and unmatched quality. The great elements that entered into this art and this civilisation that were pre-eminently the art and civilisation of Christianity were primarily two: northern blood and monastic fervour. To the worn-out vitality of the Mediterranean races came in the fresh vigour of the North, Lombard, Germanic, Norman, Frank, while the monastic impulse imparted by St. Benedict broke the spell of the Dark Ages, made possible the “false dawn” of Carolingian civilisation, and then, through its successors, the monks of Cluny in the eleventh century and the Cistercians in the twelfth, brought to perfection and to complete fulness of expression all the latent possibilities in the clean new blood that had been transfused into the hardening veins of an Europe already dangerously near dissolution.