Dinant, whose fame in the fifteenth century for the making of wonderful works of art in metal, gave the name “dinanderie” to this admirable art--Dinant, crouched under the castle-crowned cliffs of the Meuse, with its quaint church, has gone now, and gone also is Louvain, all but its Hôtel de Ville which is more like a pyx or a reliquary, or some other work of “dinanderie,” than a real building. The destruction of Louvain needs no description, for its fires have burned its story indelibly into human consciousness. We know only too well how its university was destroyed, with its priceless library and its ancient and unique manuscripts; how the great and beautiful Church of St. Pierre was swept by flames and left a hopeless ruin; how its streets were absorbed, one after another, in the roaring conflagration, covering with their débris the stains of massacre and pillage. Of Malines we know less, nor shall until the great cloud rolls back, but there was much there to lose, and some of this we know has been lost while more may follow. In spite of the altars to coal and iron outside the old cincture of the town, Malines itself was a gentle and lovely old place, gathered around its great Church of St. Rombaut with its incredible tower. A town of old houses and still canals in strangely poetic combination, a little Bruges with a finer church than any the perfect Flemish city could boast. The church itself is of a vigorous type of the earliest fourteenth-century architecture, but the great tower, which was planned as the highest and most splendid spire in the world, though it completed only three hundred and twenty of its projected five hundred and fifty feet, is fifteenth century, and as perfect an example of late Gothic at its best as may be found anywhere in the world. It is really indescribable in its combination of majesty, brilliancy of design, and inconceivable intricacy of detail. The exuberance that marks the flamboyant art of France is here controlled and directed into the most excellent channels, and if ever it had been completed it must have taken its place as the most beautiful tower in the world. As it is, it ranks in its own way with the southern flèche of Chartres and Giotto’s Tower in Florence, and more one cannot say. Information is not forthcoming as to how far it already has been wrecked; it is said that the glimmering pinnacles and niches of its amazing buttresses have suffered severely from shell-fire, and that its carillon, the finest in Belgium, has been destroyed; if nothing worse follows, the world may yet see its visionary spire take actual form at last, in the gratitude of a people for the passing from themselves, and from the world, of the shadow of death.