From Spa we went to Brussels, where I remember to have seen many times at work in the gallery the famous artist without arms who painted with his toes. What was quite a remarkable was the excellence of his copies from Rembrandt. Nature succeeded in his case in "heaping voonders oopen voonders," as Tom Hood says in his "Rhine." I became well acquainted with Tom Hood the younger in after years, and to this day I contribute something every year to _Tom Hood's Annual_. At Brussels we stayed at a charming old hotel which had galleries one above the other round the courtyard, exactly like those of the White Hart Inn immortalised in "Pickwick." There was in Philadelphia a perfect specimen of such an inn, which has of late years been rebuilt as the Bingham House. While in Spa I studied Walloon. From Brussels to Ghent, which I found much modernised from what it had been in 1847, when it was still exactly as in the Middle Age, but fearfully decayed, and, like Ferrara, literary with grass-grown streets. _Und noch weiter_--to Ostend, where for three weeks I took lessons in Flemish or Dutch from a young professor, reading "Vondel" and "Bilderdijk," who, if not in the world of letters known, deserves to be. I had no dictionary all this time, and the teacher marvelled that I always knew the meaning of the words, which will not seem marvellous to any one who understands German and has studied Anglo-Saxon and read "Middle or Early English." Then back to Spa to meet Mr. and Mrs. Trubner and her father Octave Delepierre, who was a great scholar in _rariora_, _curiosa_, and old French, and _facile princeps_ the greatest expert in Macaronic poetry who ever wrote. May I here venture to mention that he always declared that my later poem of "Breitmann and the Pope" was the best Macaronic poem which he had ever read? His reason for this was that it was the most reckless and heedless or extravagant combination of Latin and modern languages known to him. I had, however, been much indebted to Mr. Oscar Browning for revising it. And so the truth, which long in darkness lay, now comes full clearly to the light of day. Thence to Liege, Amsterdam, the Hague, Haarlem, and Leyden, visiting all the great galleries and many private collections. At Amsterdam we saw the last grand kermess or annual fair ever held there. It was a Dutch carnival, so wild and extravagant that few can comprehend now to what extremes "spreeing" can be carried. The Dutch, like the Swedes, have or had the strange habit of bottling up their hilarity and letting it out on stated occasions in uproarious frolics. I saw _carmagnoles_ in which men and women, seized by a wild impulse, whirled along the street in a frantic dance to any chance music, compelling every bystander to join. I heard of a Prince from Capua, who, having been thus _carmagnoled_, returned home in rags.