made love to her with all his might, and in due course led her to the altar, and henceforth, we may be very sure, he had a horse, if not horses, of his own. This was honest Matthew's second matrimonial experience, and it seems to have been on the whole a successful one. By his first wife he had had no children, but his widow gave him two sons, who both died young, and two daughters, of whose fate we know nothing. She seems, too, to have been fond of him, for when Matthew himself died in 1494 she lost her reason, and to the end of her days never recovered it. Like so many lunatics, she attained a great age, and was still living at Tirlemont under the care of relatives in 1520. [Illustration: HÔTEL DE VILLE, LOUVAIN.] With such a man as architect and master of the works it is not surprising that the new Town Hall was very rapidly built. The exterior was finished in the incredibly short time, for the period, of ten years, and in 1463 the interior was also completed. And had the master-mason succeeded? Did his achievement equal the expectation of his fellow-burghers? Was the municipal palace which he had built for them more splendid than the Brussels Town Hall? The latter, of course, was still unfinished; it still lacked the west wing, and the general aspect of the former was at a short distance much the same as it is now. These things being borne in mind, we think it may be safely said that honest Matthew's horn was exalted, and that the men of Louvain were happy; and perhaps it was on this account that the Brussels folk determined to enlarge their own Town Hall. And yet one cannot help feeling, as one stands before this fascinating and fantastic structure, with its crowd of statues, its dainty corbels, each one carved with a Bible tale, with its bristling roof, its filigree niches, its pinnacles soaring to heaven like crystallised incense smoke, that it is less the triumph of the mason than the triumph of the sculptor, that architecture has ceased to reign, and that one of her handmaids has usurped her place: for what have we here--bricks and mortar, or an elaborate piece of embroidery? And almost all the civic monuments of Belgium erected subsequently to this Town Hall suggest the same question. Strange that the ecclesiastical monuments of the day, planned as they were by the same men and for the same patrons, present such a different appearance. This is true, not only so far as concerns minor churches and those which are unfinished, but also in the case of completed buildings of the most ambitious character, where even such important features as west fronts, towers, transept ends, are singularly free from superfluous ornament. Take, for example, the north and the south façades of Saint Rombold's at Mechlin,[37] or Saint Gudila's Sacrament Chapel, or the western towers[38] of the same church, or the tower of Saint Gertrude's, Louvain, completed in 1453, and probably the work of De Layens.[39] They