The two remaining churches of Audenaarde, Ste. Walburga and Notre Dame, have much distinction and architectural value, particularly Notre Dame, which was Cistercian and is a surprisingly pure example of the reserved and ascetic Gothic which always marked the buildings of this order--which it largely created as a matter of fact. Ste. Walburga is quite different, with its Romanesque choir of very modest proportions, its ambitious and overshadowing nave of the fifteenth century, and its unfinished transepts showing where the great scheme of rebuilding, undertaken when it was too late and religion was already a waning force, had been abandoned. There has been too much restoration in the case of all these works of admirable art, and the ancient atmosphere is pretty well gone, but they are noble still, in spite of the nervous and mechanical attentions of archæologists and architects and other well-meaning but misguided people. IX A TALE OF THREE CITIES Still farther to the north, at the confluence of the Scheldt and the Lys, is Ghent, the proud and turbulent metropolis of the fifteenth century, the city-state that was so preposterously democratic it could never get along with its neighbours, nor even with itself; the city of De Conninck and Breidel and the Van Artevelds, of sudden and heroic courage, of irresponsible turnings from one side to the other, and a characteristic vacillation in public policy that kept it always in hot water and was in the end its undoing; the place of strange old churches and wonderful houses; the shrine of marvellous pictures and one of them perhaps, what it has been called, the greatest picture in the world. To Ghent, over which lay for centuries the oblivion that came upon all the cities of Flanders after they lost their independence and fell into the hands of the unscrupulous princes and states of the Renaissance, one following another with variety of oppression but no cessation thereof, has come a new vitality. It is as great a city now as then, counting a population of well over 200,000, while Bruges has no more than a quarter of this number. Providentially, it has suffered less than might have been feared by this accession of prosperity; its wonderful churches and tall towers, its quays with their serried lines of high gabled houses, its great castle of the Counts of Flanders, its winding streets and tortuous canals lined with ancient and lovely dwellings and spanned by little stone bridges, all tell even now for almost their full value; and though the city is quite metropolitan in its cleanness and well-being, with fine new streets and bridges and shops, the spell of a great antiquity is over it, and the new follows the old with conscientious effort and delightful delicacy of feeling. If an old city must gain a new lease of life, let it be after the fashion of Ghent.