There are one or two other churches of fragmentary value, the unique museum made out of the old dwelling and printing-office of Christopher Plantin, with its stores of mediæval and Renaissance industrial art, and the Royal Museum where there are more admirable examples of the painting of Flanders, Brabant, and the Netherlands than are to be found gathered together in any other one place. For critical, or in a limited way, artistic study, this hoarding together, cheek by jowl, of innumerable works of art collected from desecrated churches and ruined monasteries, has its uses, but no one of the pictures torn from its original and intended surroundings tells for its full value. One wonders sometimes whether a daily newspaper, a school of fine arts, or a picture-gallery is the most biting indictment of contemporary culture and artistic sense; certainly whatever the answer, the picture-gallery presents powerful claims that are not lightly to be disregarded. So, from the dunes of the North Sea around to the wide estuary of the Scheldt, the ring of defences is complete, and in the midst like a citadel lies Bruges, the Dream City, preserving, guarding, and reverencing its dreams. I knew Bruges first in 1886 when I seem to remember its old walls, when its new buildings were few and unobjectionable, and when the tourist--English, German, American--was as much of a novelty as he was an anachronism. I am told now that the walls have gone, and the boulevards and architects’ buildings, and the tourists have come in; have come in hosts, with all their destructive possibilities, but I can think only of the old Bruges, still, meditative, serene; a town Maxfield Parish might have designed, but impossible elsewhere except as a survival, by some providential miracle of beneficence, from the heart of the Middle Ages. This is not to say that Bruges has survived intact. Hurled into the midst of the maelstrom of chaos that characterised the Renaissance in all its political aspects, she was ruined utterly between Maximilian of Austria, the Calvinists, and the Duke of Alva. War and pillage, massacre, bribery, treason, the rack marked the advance in culture and civilisation beyond the dark days of mediævalism. What the Austrian spared the Protestant devoured, while the Spaniard gleaned the crumbs that remained. Bruges, that great city, proud, rich, and beautiful above all cities of the North, counted now a population of a scant 30,000, hopeless, abandoned, poverty-stricken.