North we enter into a general darkness, but on our way toward the dim old cities of Flanders and Brabant that hold even now the beauty of an elder day, forgotten by the world and outside the area of “great natural resources,” we may pause in spirit in Arras (it would not be well to be there in body, unless one were a soldier in the army of the Allies, when it would be perilous but touched with glory) for sight of an old, old city that gave a vision, better than almost any other in France, of what cities were in this region at the high-tide of the Renaissance. It is gone now, utterly, irremediably, and the ill work begun in the Revolution and continued under the empire, when the great and splendid Gothic cathedral was sold and utterly destroyed, has been finished by Prussian shells. Capital of Artois, it had a vivid and eventful history, reaching back to pre-Roman times, continuing under Baldwin of the Iron Arm, who became the first Count of Arras; then being halved between the Count of Flanders and the King of France; given by St. Louis to his brother Robert, passing to the Counts of Burgundy, reverting to Louis de Mâle of Flemish fame, abandoned to the Emperor, won back by France; then acquiring the sinister distinction of having produced Robespierre and, finally, coming now to its end at the hands of the German hosts. What Arras must have been before the Revolution we can only guess, but with its glorious cathedral, its Chapelle des Ardents, and its “Pyramid of the Holy Candle” added to its surviving town hall with its fantastically beautiful spire, and its miraculously preserved streets and squares lined with fancifully gabled and arcaded houses, it must have been a sanctuary of old delights. The cathedral was of all styles from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, while the chapel and the “pyramid,” were models of mediæval art in its richest state. Both were destroyed by one Lebon, a human demon and apostate priest, who organised a “terror” of his own in his city and has gone down to infamy for his pestilential crimes. Both the destroyed monuments were votive offerings in gratitude to Our Lady for her miraculous intervention in the case of a fearful plague in the twelfth century, the instrument of preservation being a certain holy candle, the melted wax from which was effective in preserving the life of all it touched. The pyramid was a slender Gothic tabernacle and spire, ninety feet high, standing in the Petite Place, a masterpiece of carved and painted and gilded sculptures, unique of its kind. Every vestige has vanished except a few relics preserved, together with that most precious memorial, the blood-stained rochet of St. Thomas à Becket, in the modern cathedral which Berlin has just announced has been completely and intentionally destroyed by gun-fire.