that, though the difference in width of the inner aisles is something like two feet, and in the case of the outer aisles no less than four feet seven inches. Most impressive is the view of the nave as one stands beneath the chancel arch, no less pleasing is the view athwart the church as seen from the baptistery chapel with the face turned towards the south-east, but choose what coign of vantage you will, and you shall behold visions of loveliness. SAINT MICHEL ET SAINTE GUDULE The saint to whom the mother church of Brussels is dedicated, is, and has been from time immemorial, almost a phantom saint, a half-forgotten memory, little more than a name--Gudule, or as the earlier chroniclers have it, Gudila. Of her life's story hardly anything is certainly known. If any scribe of her own day wrote of her, no trace of his writing remains. The manuscript, if it ever existed, was no doubt destroyed at the time of the Danish Invasion, and when the storm had passed, and a new generation of chroniclers began to gather up the fragments--to collect, that is, and to note down from the lips of the few monks who had survived its fury, whatever they had to relate of the sayings and doings of the saints whose _acta_ had perished, they seem to have been able to learn very little of the life of Gudila, save that she was among the forbears of Charlemagne's race, that she dwelt in a castle hard by Alost, at a place called Mortzel, and after having lived an exemplary life, died there in the odour of sanctity somewhere about the year 712. [Illustration: SAINT MICHEL ET SAINTE GUDULE.] The earliest life that has come down to us, however, was not penned by any of these chroniclers: it dates from a much later period and cannot have been written before 1047, for it gives an account of the translation of Saint Gudila's relics which took place in that year. It is dedicated by the author, one Hubert, perhaps a canon of _Sainte Gudule_, to his 'beloved brother Albert, who had given him an old manuscript containing a few scanty notes--rare jewels, but ill cut and ill set--concerning the virtues of gentle Gudila,' in order that he might turn them into good Latin. This seems to have been the main source of Hubert's information, and being seemingly an honest man who scorned to draw on his imagination he has very little to tell us of his heroine's intimate life. 'In my opinion,' he says, 'it is a holier thing to keep silence than to tell lies.'