Hans Memlinc was a man of lofty ideals, and his creations are sometimes sublime, but not always. John van Eyck was cast in a different mould. He was content to portray Nature as he saw her. Give me beautiful models, we can imagine him saying, and I will paint you beautiful pictures. Give me ill-favoured models, and your pictures shall be beautiful still. Yet do I scorn to flatter; I will be true to life. If I must needs paint Flemings, my portraits shall be the portraits of Flemings. I will neither make a fat man thin nor a coarse woman refined. I will portray every blemish and every wrinkle, but I will place my figures to the best advantage. Their surroundings shall be magnificent; I will set them in the midst of fair courts and lovely temples; I will array them in the most becoming garments; I will bathe them in an aureole of glorious tones. Your eye shall be enchanted by the symmetry of my grouping and the graceful flow of my drapery; I will shower jewels with a lavish hand, and I will harmonize everything with my magic gold. Thus will I compel you to fall down and adore the splendour of the True. CHAPTER XXV _Modern Bruges_ We have said that Bruges never recovered from the blow which Maximilian had dealt her. She had no chance of doing so. Misfortune followed misfortune. Most of her foreign merchants had migrated to Antwerp, and once settled there they were loth to return. The discovery of America, and of a new route to the Indies, added to her discomfiture by forcing commerce to forsake its old paths and its old havens; the river, the source of her wealth, was rapidly filling with sand. As early as 1410 the navigation of the Zwyn, even as far as Sluys, had become exceedingly difficult; by the close of the century no great vessel could reach Damme, and before another fifty years had elapsed Bruges was altogether cut off from the sea. If a ship canal had been made, as Lancelot Blondeel suggested, from the city to Heyst, where there is deep water quite close to the shore, she might perchance have yet found salvation. But still poor, and weary from her conflict with Maximilian, she had neither the means nor the heart to carry out so vast a project. Then, too, there were the troubles bred of the religious revolution and the tyranny of Spanish rule; the cruelty of Philip, and the cruelty of Alva, and the no less cruel retaliation of 'the Beggars of the Sea,' who on March 26, 1578, captured the city, and by the aid of Colonel Henry Balfour, a Scotch adventurer in the service of William of Orange, held it for six years.