Thus, thanks in great measure to the initiative of the Church, the evil days were tided over. When, later on, in the following century, the wars and rumours of wars had passed away, and the 'pastoral folk' of the Franc were enabled to obtain some profit from their former avocations, Bruges to a certain extent participated in their prosperity; but though she on more than one occasion essayed to revive her commerce--notably in 1722 by the canalization of the river Yperlet, with a view to putting herself in communication with Ostend--her efforts in each case proved abortive. Flanders had become, to quote the words of a seventeenth-century historian, _famosum antiquitatis sepulchrum_, and her capital was constrained to live on the reputation of its former glory. Let us not, however, shed too many tears over the commercial decay of Bruges. If her prosperity had continued she would hardly have remained what she still is--the fairest city in Northern Europe. We know indeed that her private palaces were suffered to fall into decay because their owners were too poor to maintain them, but if they had been never so rich the old buildings would have disappeared just the same. The art of the Middle Ages was abhorrent to the eighteenth century, and the Gothic palaces of Bruges would surely have given place to rococo mansions. Moreover, that same poverty which destroyed so much of her splendour not only endowed her, as we have seen, with a multitude of picturesque buildings, but has preserved for us what remains of her ancient domestic architecture. On the 2nd of October 1670 the members of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament established in the Church of St. Sauveur--now the Cathedral--decreed that the three fifteenth-century stained-glass windows in their chantry--the central chapel of the ambulatory, immediately behind the high altar--should be forthwith destroyed, in order that the public might the better appreciate the new altar they had erected, which 'was such an admirable imitation of marble.' In 1739 a like act of vandalism, but on a larger scale, was perpetrated in the same church. The ancient stained-glass windows were at this time removed from the clerestory of the choir and replaced by white glass, and there were no less than thirteen of them. Similar outrages were committed in all the churches and public buildings of Bruges, and if only her private citizens had been rich enough to pull down and rebuild their dwellings there would have been little left by this time of the mediæval city.