There is only one municipal building in Brussels which dates from the period we are now considering, but that building is perhaps unique. Search where you will you will hardly find a more perfect specimen of civic architecture, and this at least may be said without fear of contradiction: no city can boast a nobler town hall than that which Brussels possesses. Ypres, perhaps, someone will say, or Longfellow's 'quaint old Flemish city,' but the great hall of Ypres was not the place where the Senate met, but a cloth market, and though the Town Hall of Bruges is a gem, for this very reason it cannot compete with the Town Hall of Brussels--as well compare, say, the Sainte Chapelle with Westminster Abbey. Of course it is not perfect. Where on earth will you find perfection either in architecture or anything else? But this much may be justly said, the Town Hall of Brussels approaches nearer to perfection than any other building of its kind in Europe which dates from the same period, even in its present state, for we do not see it now, be it borne in mind, as it was in the heyday of its glory. The army of burgomasters who stand under niches between the first and second storey of the east wing were not there in those days: they are a modern addition of 1863, and take the place of a blind arcade of a very simple character, which was certainly never intended to be peopled with statues. Nor is this all, if we would picture to ourselves the old building as it used to be we must not only subtract, we must add. The original statues, about half as many as there are now, probably somewhat smaller, and certainly more vigorously, and, at the same time, more delicately, carved, were all of them arrayed in vestures of gold, wrought about with divers colours, and in those days, we must not forget, the men of the Low Countries had an eye for colour, and the greatest painters of the age did not think it beneath their dignity to busy themselves with work of this kind. In the early days the Senate of Brussels had no fixed place of assembly. The city fathers held their meetings sometimes in convents, sometimes in churches, sometimes in private dwellings, sometimes in the open air, and it was not until the year 1300 that they obtained a Town Hall, or rather what did duty for a Town Hall--'a house of stone,' in the _Ster Straat_, now the _Rue de l'Hôtel de Ville_, which they had recently purchased from a mercer named Odo, and in this old house of stone--most houses were in those days of timber--justice was administered and all public business transacted for more than a hundred years, until at last, in the fulness of time, the present Town Hall was built.