To the up-to-date art critic of the weekly press, steeped in modernity, all this grand religious art of the middle ages is but as the dead ashes of a fire that once glowed but has now lost its warmth; or, to vary the simile, he contemptuously relegates it to the scrap-heap of antiquated material as the useless remains of a “dead language”; little bethinking himself of the great underlying truth he was unconsciously voicing. For just as all succeeding literatures found their spring and inspiration in the magnificent literatures enshrined in the great dead languages of Rome and Greece, so likewise has modern art, unconsciously if you will, but none the less assuredly, derived the essence of its loveliness from the mediæval art it affects to despise. Art of any kind to be great must have realised its greatness through the vivifying power of the art that had gone before. _Ex nihilo nihil fit._ The impellent craving after realism of the materialistic school of to-day is but a perverted form of the love of truth which was the keynote of all mediæval art, its cult of the sensuous but a depraved phase of a love of the beauty in virtue and godliness which characterised the latter: the great touch of faith is wholly wanting. In art as in all things human there is no finality; but the while Bruges subsists, though she were utterly bereft of all her picturesqueness and the wealth of architectural beauty that endears her to the artist mind, so long will that treasure-house of Memlinc’s art, the small chapter-room in the Hospital of Saint John, continue to exercise its educating influence, and so long, because of it, will the old Flemish capital, though shorn of all its pristine glory, continue to be one of the most cherished shrines of the art pilgrims of the world. The plates are printed by BEMROSE & SONS, LTD., Derby and London The text at the BALLANTYNE PRESS, Edinburgh End of Project Gutenberg's Memlinc, by W. H. James Weale and J. Cyril Weale