Inevitably, when one thinks of Malines, Louvain, Ypres, Arras, Soissons, Reims, there comes the suggestion of possible restorations, concretely expressed already by German savants and archæologists incapable of comprehending the difference between art and imitation, and as some palliation for the evils that have been done. It is a thought that must resolutely be put aside. As I said in speaking of Reims, if enough remains to be made habitable by simple patching and protection, let this be done by all means, but without a foot of false carving or glass or sculpture. Build other churches if you like, and as you must, and perhaps on the old general lines, though elsewhere, but let us have no more a Pierrefond or a Mt. St. Michael. What is gone is gone irrevocably, and its shells and shards are too valuable in their eternal teaching to be obliterated by well-meant schemes of rehabilitation. When a whole town passes, as Ypres and Louvain and Arras, then as it fell so let it lie. A kindly nature will slowly turn these bleak piles of fallen masonry into beautiful memorials, clothing them with grass and vines and flowers and trees. Let them stand so for ever, a memorial to the dead and a warning to man in his pride of life and insolence of will; and for the new cities, let them rise as beautifully as may be alongside, but not over, the graves of a dead era. Glastonbury and Jumièges, in their solemn and noble ruin, tell their story to ears that at last are disposed to listen, and the story of Reims and Louvain, with the same moral at its end, must be told eternally after the same fashion. X MARGARET OF MALINES The historians always call her Marguerite of Austria, but this is hardly fair, for even if she were a daughter of the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian she did not come into her own until she took up her residence in a beautiful castle in Malines and made that own the fortune and the destinies and the happiness of the Flemish people who had been given her. On both her father’s side and her mother’s she was English, if you go back far enough, her great, great, great-grandfather having been that “John of Gaunt (Ghent), time-honoured Lancaster” of whom we have heard before. Her mother, Mary of Burgundy, who died when she was a baby, traced her line back through Charles the Bold and Isabella of Bourbon to John of Gaunt’s daughter, Philippa, who married John I of Portugal; and it is through Philippa’s son Eduard and his daughter Eleanor who married Maximilian’s father, the Emperor Frederick III, that the strain comes on the father’s side. So “Margaret of Malines” let her be; and as well the well-beloved Regent of Flanders, for never, even in the great days of great kings and governors, was there ever a better sovereign or a more engaging lady.