The greatest ruin was wrought by one Balfour, a creature in the pay of William of Orange, who in 1578 captured the city and held it for six years, during which time the Catholic religion was prohibited, the bishop was imprisoned, all priests were either driven into exile or tortured and then burned at the stake, while churches were destroyed, turned into stables, sacked and desecrated, and more great pictures, statues, shrines, windows, sacred vessels, and vestments were destroyed than have been miraculously preserved. Every religious house in the vicinity was completely expunged, including the vast Cistercian monastery of Coxyde, the most glorious church in Flanders; and its wide-spread gardens, fields, and orchards regained from the dunes by centuries of labour, reverted to their original estate, and desolation took the place of beneficent and hard-won fertility. Out of this reign of terror came as some compensation the saving of Bruges--or what was left of it. In 1560 the Pope had made the city an episcopal see, on the urging of Philip II, and after Balfour had met a well-merited, but too sudden and merciful, death, the exiled and plundered orders took refuge within its walls, building new and humbler quarters for themselves and hospitals and almshouses for the miserable citizens. The Church took the place of commerce, and under its care some degree of life came back to the ruined city; and the quality it then took on, of a community of religious houses, institutions of charity and mercy, and old churches restored again to their proper uses, it has never lost. Toward the end of the seventeenth and all through the eighteenth century the slow destruction of old beauty went on, though with a different impulse. Now it was the unescapable vandalism of ignorance and degraded taste that marked the time; old windows that had escaped the Calvinists were pulled out so that a better light might fall on a new altar, since it was “such an admirable imitation of marble,” even as happened in Chartres, where some of the matchless windows were contemptuously cast into a ditch to reveal the tawdry splendours of the lamentable high altar and imitation marble of the choir which represented the enlightened intelligence of the eighteenth-century canons. The sixteenth century was bad enough, but one wonders sometimes how any continental culture survived the eighteenth century. Later, when the nineteenth century came to crown with perfect achievement the arduous but incomplete efforts of its predecessor, ugly and barbarous houses took the place of only too many of the beautiful works of the Middle Ages, and finally the wonderful old walls were ruthlessly razed to give place to silly boulevards. And in spite of it all Bruges survives, and more completely than any other city of the North, for it is farthest away from the kingdom of coal and iron, and if war passes it by, it may still remain an oasis, a sanctuary in the desert.