In the days of Duchess Isabel (1598-1633) and her husband Albert of Austria (1598-1621), on whom on his deathbed King Philip had conferred the sovereignty of the Low Countries, Brussels enjoyed unbroken peace and a period of comparative prosperity. They resided for the most part in the old ducal palace, and were greatly beloved by the burghers: they did what they could to make them forget the miseries of Philip's reign. If they had been able to found a dynasty, it is likely enough the land would have been spared many years of trouble; but, dying without offspring, their heritage reverted to Spain, and shared the misfortunes of that once great nation, now in full decadence. From 1635 to 1714 the Spanish Netherlands was the scene of almost uninterrupted warfare; yet, strangely enough, throughout the whole of this period the masons of Brabant went on building, and, stranger still, were able to erect structures not unworthy of their great traditions. At Brussels, for example, the beautiful Gothic Chapel of Our Lady of Deliverance (1649-1653), the Renaissance Chapel of the Brigitine Nuns (of about the same date), the Chapel of Saint Anne (1655), the Church of the Béguinage (1657), of the Riches Claires (1665-1671), of Notre-Dame de Bon Secours (1668-1673), the Guild Halls in the Grand' Place--no less than seventeen of them, all erected after the bombardment of 1695. [Illustration: NOTRE-DAME D'HANSWYCK, MALINES.] Brussels, of course, was now the capital, and probably too at this time the richest town in the Spanish Netherlands; but cities which had not these advantages somehow or other managed to produce grand buildings. At Louvain we have the Church of Saint Michael (1650-1666), the College of the Holy Trinity (1657), the College of the Holy Ghost (1720); and at Mechlin, the Church of Saint Peter (1677) and the Church of Our Lady of Hanswyck (1670). These strange rococo creations assuredly cannot compete with the buildings of the fourteen and fifteen hundreds, but they have a certain fantastic charm of their own; they are at least picturesque, and, curiously enough, they bear no trace of the lean years which produced them. Wherefore? The industry, the thrift, the business qualities of the burghers, who still through their representatives in the Estates of Brabant administered the finances of the realm; their inborn love of the beautiful; their traditional skill in creating it; the survival of the mediæval craft guilds and of the mediæval faith: in these things we probably have the answer to the riddle. [Illustration: SAINTS PIERRE ET PAUL, MALINES.]