When, about the opening of the fifteen hundreds, or possibly even earlier, the Church of Saint Peter's was at last completed, so far as it ever was completed, for, of course, the outside is still in an unfinished state, had the men of Louvain realised their ambition--had they made Saint Gudila hang her head? The two churches are so unlike that they hardly admit of comparison, though in those days, of course, they more nearly resembled one another than they do now. We think that on the whole the men of Louvain were satisfied with their achievement, are quite certain that they all maintained that their own church was the more beautiful, and, if an impartial critic had been asked to decide the question, we are by no means sure that he would not have said that the Petermen were right. He would have beheld in Saint Gudila's a vaster church than its rival--though it was not so large then as it is now--a church, from the varied styles in which it was built, more interesting, more picturesque, possessed of a charm that Saint Peter's had not--old age, and, with some of its architectural features, more beautiful than anything to be found at Louvain. In Saint Peter's, on the other hand, he would have seen a church of uniform and well-digested plan, less vast but of nobler proportions, not the creation of many artists of varied taste and unequal talents, but the crowning achievement of one master mind--a church, too, in all probability, more lavishly and more elaborately adorned, and possessed of a richer garniture: walls glowing with frescoes, windows resplendent with stained glass, stonework illuminated with colour and gold everywhere, a screen and rood unmatched in Christendom, choir stalls of chaste design and perfect workmanship, an eagle lectern, unique, a tabernacle fifty feet high, Matthew de Layens's masterpiece; and what a show of metal work!--iron, copper, brass, exquisitely wrought; what triumphs of the goldsmith's art! what precious stones and costly stuffs! how many glorious pictures by the first craftsmen of the age--Boudts, Metsys, Van der Weyden! And what to-day of all this splendour? Fuit ... nunc nihil. Not a splinter of stained glass, frescoes wiped out, an attenuated remnant of church furniture mutilated and defaced. And for this state of things the legal guardians of Saint Peter's of days gone by--for the most part in the eighteen hundreds--the chapter as long as it lasted, and later on the 'Fabrique' must be largely held responsible, though, of course, not altogether: fanatics of various orders also wrought much mischief. Maybe, too, the church was whitewashed for the first time after the great plague of 1576, and, if this were so, the obliteration of the frescoes, however much we may regret it, can hardly be described as an act of wanton vandalism; but what are we to think of the wiseacres of 1793, who broke up the tomb of Duke Henry the Warrior, a relic of the second church, richly sculptured