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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Travels and Roadside Sketches, by 
+William Makepeace Thackeray
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Little Travels and Roadside Sketches
+
+Author: William Makepeace Thackeray
+
+Release Date: May 27, 2006 [EBook #2843]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE TRAVELS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Donald Lainson
+
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE TRAVELS AND ROADSIDE SKETCHES
+
+
+By William Makepeace Thackeray (AKA Titmarsh)
+
+
+
+
+I. FROM RICHMOND IN SURREY TO BRUSSELS IN BELGIUM
+
+II. GHENT--BRUGES:--
+
+Ghent (1840)
+
+Bruges
+
+III. WATERLOO
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE TRAVELS AND ROADSIDE SKETCHES
+
+
+
+
+I.--FROM RICHMOND IN SURREY TO BRUSSELS IN BELGIUM
+
+
+. . . I quitted the "Rose Cottage Hotel" at Richmond, one of the
+comfortablest, quietest, cheapest, neatest little inns in England, and
+a thousand times preferable, in my opinion, to the "Star and Garter,"
+whither, if you go alone, a sneering waiter, with his hair curled,
+frightens you off the premises; and where, if you are bold enough to
+brave the sneering waiter, you have to pay ten shillings for a bottle
+of claret; and whence, if you look out of the window, you gaze on a view
+which is so rich that it seems to knock you down with its splendor--a
+view that has its hair curled like the swaggering waiter: I say, I
+quitted the "Rose Cottage Hotel" with deep regret, believing that I
+should see nothing so pleasant as its gardens, and its veal cutlets, and
+its dear little bowling-green, elsewhere. But the time comes when people
+must go out of town, and so I got on the top of the omnibus, and the
+carpet-bag was put inside.
+
+
+If I were a great prince and rode outside of coaches (as I should if I
+were a great prince), I would, whether I smoked or not, have a case of
+the best Havanas in my pocket--not for my own smoking, but to give them
+to the snobs on the coach, who smoke the vilest cheroots. They poison
+the air with the odor of their filthy weeds. A man at all easy in his
+circumstances would spare himself much annoyance by taking the above
+simple precaution.
+
+A gentleman sitting behind me tapped me on the back and asked for a
+light. He was a footman, or rather valet. He had no livery, but the
+three friends who accompanied him were tall men in pepper-and-salt
+undress jackets with a duke's coronet on their buttons.
+
+After tapping me on the back, and when he had finished his cheroot,
+the gentleman produced another wind-instrument, which he called a
+"kinopium," a sort of trumpet, on which he showed a great inclination
+to play. He began puffing out of the "kinopium" a most abominable
+air, which he said was the "Duke's March." It was played by particular
+request of one of the pepper-and-salt gentry.
+
+The noise was so abominable that even the coachman objected (although
+my friend's brother footmen were ravished with it), and said that it
+was not allowed to play toons on HIS 'bus. "Very well," said the valet,
+"WE'RE ONLY OF THE DUKE OF B----'S ESTABLISHMENT, THAT'S ALL." The
+coachman could not resist that appeal to his fashionable feelings. The
+valet was allowed to play his infernal kinopium, and the poor fellow
+(the coachman), who had lived in some private families, was quite
+anxious to conciliate the footmen "of the Duke of B.'s establishment,
+that's all," and told several stories of his having been groom in
+Captain Hoskins's family, NEPHEW OF GOVERNOR HOSKINS; which stories the
+footmen received with great contempt.
+
+The footmen were like the rest of the fashionable world in this
+respect. I felt for my part that I respected them. They were in daily
+communication with a duke! They were not the rose, but they had lived
+beside it. There is an odor in the English aristocracy which intoxicates
+plebeians. I am sure that any commoner in England, though he would die
+rather than confess it, would have a respect for those great big hulking
+Duke's footmen.
+
+The day before, her Grace the Duchess had passed us alone in a
+chariot-and-four with two outriders. What better mark of innate
+superiority could man want? Here was a slim lady who required four--six
+horses to herself, and four servants (kinopium was, no doubt, one of the
+number) to guard her.
+
+We were sixteen inside and out, and had consequently an eighth of a
+horse apiece.
+
+A duchess = 6, a commoner = 1/8; that is to say,
+
+1 duchess = 48 commoners.
+
+If I were a duchess of the present day, I would say to the duke my noble
+husband, "My dearest grace, I think, when I travel alone in my chariot
+from Hammersmith to London, I will not care for the outriders. In these
+days, when there is so much poverty and so much disaffection in the
+country, we should not eclabousser the canaille with the sight of our
+preposterous prosperity."
+
+But this is very likely only plebeian envy, and I dare say, if I were
+a lovely duchess of the realm, I would ride in a coach-and-six, with a
+coronet on the top of my bonnet and a robe of velvet and ermine even in
+the dog-days.
+
+Alas! these are the dog-days. Many dogs are abroad--snarling dogs,
+biting dogs, envious dogs, mad dogs; beware of exciting the fury of
+such with your flaming red velvet and dazzling ermine. It makes ragged
+Lazarus doubly hungry to see Dives feasting in cloth-of-gold; and so
+if I were a beauteous duchess . . . Silence, vain man! Can the Queen
+herself make you a duchess? Be content, then, nor gibe at thy betters of
+"the Duke of B----'s establishment-- that's all."
+
+
+ON BOARD THE "ANTWERPEN," OFF EVERYWHERE.
+
+We have bidden adieu to Billingsgate, we have passed the Thames Tunnel;
+it is one o'clock, and of course people are thinking of being hungry.
+What a merry place a steamer is on a calm sunny summer forenoon, and
+what an appetite every one seems to have! We are, I assure you, no less
+than 170 noblemen and gentlemen together, pacing up and down under the
+awning, or lolling on the sofas in the cabin, and hardly have we passed
+Greenwich when the feeding begins. The company was at the brandy and
+soda-water in an instant (there is a sort of legend that the beverage is
+a preservative against sea-sickness), and I admired the penetration of
+gentlemen who partook of the drink. In the first place, the steward WILL
+put so much brandy into the tumbler that it is fit to choke you; and,
+secondly, the soda-water, being kept as near as possible to the boiler
+of the engine, is of a fine wholesome heat when presented to the hot and
+thirsty traveller. Thus he is prevented from catching any sudden cold
+which might be dangerous to him.
+
+The forepart of the vessel is crowded to the full as much as the
+genteeler quarter. There are four carriages, each with piles of
+imperials and aristocratic gimcracks of travel, under the wheels of
+which those personages have to clamber who have a mind to look at the
+bowsprit, and perhaps to smoke a cigar at ease. The carriages overcome,
+you find yourself confronted by a huge penful of Durham oxen, lying
+on hay and surrounded by a barricade of oars. Fifteen of these horned
+monsters maintain an incessant mooing and bellowing. Beyond the cows
+come a heap of cotton-bags, beyond the cotton-bags more carriages, more
+pyramids of travelling trunks, and valets and couriers bustling and
+swearing round about them. And already, and in various corners and
+niches, lying on coils of rope, black tar-cloths, ragged cloaks, or hay,
+you see a score of those dubious fore-cabin passengers, who are never
+shaved, who always look unhappy, and appear getting ready to be sick.
+
+At one, dinner begins in the after-cabin--boiled salmon, boiled beef,
+boiled mutton, boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes, and parboiled wine for
+any gentlemen who like it, and two roast-ducks between seventy. After
+this, knobs of cheese are handed round on a plate, and there is a talk
+of a tart somewhere at some end of the table. All this I saw peeping
+through a sort of meat-safe which ventilates the top of the cabin, and
+very happy and hot did the people seem below.
+
+"How the deuce CAN people dine at such an hour?" say several genteel
+fellows who are watching the manoeuvres. "I can't touch a morsel before
+seven."
+
+But somehow at half-past three o'clock we had dropped a long way down
+the river. The air was delightfully fresh, the sky of a faultless
+cobalt, the river shining and flashing like quicksilver, and at this
+period steward runs against me bearing two great smoking dishes covered
+by two great glistening hemispheres of tin. "Fellow," says I, "what's
+that?"
+
+He lifted up the cover: it was ducks and green pease, by jingo!
+
+"What! haven't they done YET, the greedy creatures?" I asked. "Have the
+people been feeding for three hours?"
+
+"Law bless you, sir, it's the second dinner. Make haste, or you won't
+get a place." At which words a genteel party, with whom I had been
+conversing, instantly tumbled down the hatchway, and I find myself one
+of the second relay of seventy who are attacking the boiled salmon,
+boiled beef, boiled cabbage, &c. As for the ducks, I certainly had
+some pease, very fine yellow stiff pease, that ought to have been
+split before they were boiled; but, with regard to the ducks, I saw the
+animals gobbled up before my eyes by an old widow lady and her party
+just as I was shrieking to the steward to bring a knife and fork to
+carve them. The fellow! (I mean the widow lady's whiskered companion)--I
+saw him eat pease with the very knife with which he had dissected the
+duck!
+
+After dinner (as I need not tell the keen observer of human nature who
+peruses this) the human mind, if the body be in a decent state, expands
+into gayety and benevolence, and the intellect longs to measure itself
+in friendly converse with the divers intelligences around it. We ascend
+upon deck, and after eying each other for a brief space and with a
+friendly modest hesitation, we begin anon to converse about the weather
+and other profound and delightful themes of English discourse. We
+confide to each other our respective opinions of the ladies round about
+us. Look at that charming creature in a pink bonnet and a dress of the
+pattern of a Kilmarnock snuff-box: a stalwart Irish gentleman in a green
+coat and bushy red whiskers is whispering something very agreeable into
+her ear, as is the wont of gentlemen of his nation; for her dark eyes
+kindle, her red lips open and give an opportunity to a dozen beautiful
+pearly teeth to display themselves, and glance brightly in the sun;
+while round the teeth and the lips a number of lovely dimples make their
+appearance, and her whole countenance assumes a look of perfect health
+and happiness. See her companion in shot silk and a dove-colored
+parasol; in what a graceful Watteau-like attitude she reclines. The tall
+courier who has been bouncing about the deck in attendance upon these
+ladies (it is his first day of service, and he is eager to make a
+favorable impression on them and the lady's-maids too) has just brought
+them from the carriage a small paper of sweet cakes (nothing is prettier
+than to see a pretty woman eating sweet biscuits) and a bottle that
+evidently contains Malmsey madeira. How daintily they sip it; how happy
+they seem; how that lucky rogue of an Irishman prattles away! Yonder
+is a noble group indeed: an English gentleman and his family. Children,
+mother, grandmother, grown-up daughters, father, and domestics,
+twenty-two in all. They have a table to themselves on the deck, and the
+consumption of eatables among them is really endless. The nurses have
+been bustling to and fro, and bringing, first, slices of cake; then
+dinner; then tea with huge family jugs of milk; and the little people
+have been playing hide-and-seek round the deck, coquetting with the
+other children, and making friends of every soul on board. I love to
+see the kind eyes of women fondly watching them as they gambol about; a
+female face, be it ever so plain, when occupied in regarding children,
+becomes celestial almost, and a man can hardly fail to be good and happy
+while he is looking on at such sights. "Ah, sir!" says a great big man,
+whom you would not accuse of sentiment, "I have a couple of those little
+things at home;" and he stops and heaves a great big sigh and swallows
+down a half-tumbler of cold something and water. We know what the honest
+fellow means well enough. He is saying to himself, "God bless my girls
+and their mother!" but, being a Briton, is too manly to speak out in a
+more intelligible way. Perhaps it is as well for him to be quiet, and
+not chatter and gesticulate like those Frenchmen a few yards from him,
+who are chirping over a bottle of champagne.
+
+There is, as you may fancy, a number of such groups on the deck, and
+a pleasant occupation it is for a lonely man to watch them and build
+theories upon them, and examine those two personages seated cheek by
+jowl. One is an English youth, travelling for the first time, who has
+been hard at his Guidebook during the whole journey. He has a "Manuel du
+Voyageur" in his pocket: a very pretty, amusing little oblong work it is
+too, and might be very useful, if the foreign people in three languages,
+among whom you travel, would but give the answers set down in the book,
+or understand the questions you put to them out of it. The other honest
+gentleman in the fur cap, what can his occupation be? We know him at
+once for what he is. "Sir," says he, in a fine German accent, "I am a
+brofessor of languages, and will gif you lessons in Danish, Swedish,
+English, Bortuguese, Spanish and Bersian." Thus occupied in meditations,
+the rapid hours and the rapid steamer pass quickly on. The sun is
+sinking, and, as he drops, the ingenious luminary sets the Thames on
+fire: several worthy gentlemen, watch in hand, are eagerly examining the
+phenomena attending his disappearance,--rich clouds of purple and gold,
+that form the curtains of his bed,--little barks that pass black across
+his disc, his disc every instant dropping nearer and nearer into the
+water. "There he goes!" says one sagacious observer. "No, he doesn't,"
+cries another. Now he is gone, and the steward is already threading the
+deck, asking the passengers, right and left, if they will take a
+little supper. What a grand object is a sunset, and what a wonder is an
+appetite at sea! Lo! the horned moon shines pale over Margate, and the
+red beacon is gleaming from distant Ramsgate pier.
+
+*****
+
+A great rush is speedily made for the mattresses that lie in the boat at
+the ship's side; and as the night is delightfully calm, many fair ladies
+and worthy men determine to couch on deck for the night. The proceedings
+of the former, especially if they be young and pretty, the philosopher
+watches with indescribable emotion and interest. What a number of pretty
+coquetries do the ladies perform, and into what pretty attitudes do they
+take care to fall! All the little children have been gathered up by the
+nursery-maids, and are taken down to roost below. Balmy sleep seals
+the eyes of many tired wayfarers, as you see in the case of the Russian
+nobleman asleep among the portmanteaus; and Titmarsh, who has been
+walking the deck for some time with a great mattress on his shoulders,
+knowing full well that were he to relinquish it for an instant, some
+other person would seize on it, now stretches his bed upon the deck,
+wraps his cloak about his knees, draws his white cotton nightcap tight
+over his head and ears; and, as the smoke of his cigar rises calmly
+upwards to the deep sky and the cheerful twinkling stars, he feels
+himself exquisitely happy, and thinks of thee, my Juliana!
+
+*****
+
+Why people, because they are in a steamboat, should get up so deucedly
+early I cannot understand. Gentlemen have been walking over my legs ever
+since three o'clock this morning, and, no doubt, have been indulging
+in personalities (which I hate) regarding my appearance and manner of
+sleeping, lying, snoring. Let the wags laugh on; but a far pleasanter
+occupation is to sleep until breakfast-time, or near it.
+
+The tea, and ham and eggs, which, with a beefsteak or two, and three
+or four rounds of toast, form the component parts of the above-named
+elegant meal, are taken in the River Scheldt. Little neat, plump-looking
+churches and villages are rising here and there among tufts of trees and
+pastures that are wonderfully green. To the right, as the "Guide-book"
+says, is Walcheren; and on the left Cadsand, memorable for the English
+expedition of 1809, when Lord Chatham, Sir Walter Manny, and Henry Earl
+of Derby, at the head of the English, gained a great victory over the
+Flemish mercenaries in the pay of Philippe of Valois. The cloth-yard
+shafts of the English archers did great execution. Flushing was taken,
+and Lord Chatham returned to England, where he distinguished himself
+greatly in the debates on the American war, which he called the
+brightest jewel of the British crown. You see, my love, that, though an
+artist by profession, my education has by no means been neglected; and
+what, indeed, would be the pleasure of travel, unless these charming
+historical recollections were brought to bear upon it?
+
+
+ANTWERP.
+
+As many hundreds of thousands of English visit this city (I have met
+at least a hundred of them in this half-hour walking the streets,
+"Guide-book" in hand), and as the ubiquitous Murray has already depicted
+the place, there is no need to enter into a long description of it,
+its neatness, its beauty, and its stiff antique splendor. The tall
+pale houses have many of them crimped gables, that look like Queen
+Elizabeth's ruffs. There are as many people in the streets as in London
+at three o'clock in the morning; the market-women wear bonnets of
+a flower-pot shape, and have shining brazen milk-pots, which are
+delightful to the eyes of a painter. Along the quays of the lazy Scheldt
+are innumerable good-natured groups of beer-drinkers (small-beer is the
+most good-natured drink in the world); along the barriers outside of
+the town, and by the glistening canals, are more beer-shops and more
+beer-drinkers. The city is defended by the queerest fat military. The
+chief traffic is between the hotels and the railroad. The hotels give
+wonderful good dinners, and especially at the "Grand Laboureur" may be
+mentioned a peculiar tart, which is the best of all tarts that ever a
+man ate since he was ten years old. A moonlight walk is delightful. At
+ten o'clock the whole city is quiet; and so little changed does it seem
+to be, that you may walk back three hundred years into time, and fancy
+yourself a majestical Spaniard, or an oppressed and patriotic Dutchman
+at your leisure. You enter the inn, and the old Quentin Durward
+court-yard, on which the old towers look down. There is a sound of
+singing--singing at midnight. Is it Don Sombrero, who is singing an
+Andalusian seguidilla under the window of the Flemish burgomaster's
+daughter? Ah, no! it is a fat Englishman in a zephyr coat: he is
+drinking cold gin-and-water in the moonlight, and warbling softly--
+
+     "Nix my dolly, pals, fake away,
+     N-ix my dolly, pals, fake a--a--way."*
+
+
+     * In 1844.
+
+I wish the good people would knock off the top part of Antwerp Cathedral
+spire. Nothing can be more gracious and elegant than the lines of the
+first two compartments; but near the top there bulges out a little
+round, ugly, vulgar Dutch monstrosity (for which the architects have, no
+doubt, a name) which offends the eye cruelly. Take the Apollo, and set
+upon him a bob-wig and a little cocked hat; imagine "God Save the King"
+ending with a jig; fancy a polonaise, or procession of slim, stately,
+elegant court beauties, headed by a buffoon dancing a hornpipe. Marshal
+Gerard should have discharged a bombshell at that abomination, and have
+given the noble steeple a chance to be finished in the grand style of
+the early fifteenth century, in which it was begun.
+
+This style of criticism is base and mean, and quite contrary to the
+orders of the immortal Goethe, who was only for allowing the eye to
+recognize the beauties of a great work, but would have its defects
+passed over. It is an unhappy, luckless organization which will be
+perpetually fault-finding, and in the midst of a grand concert of music
+will persist only in hearing that unfortunate fiddle out of tune.
+
+Within--except where the rococo architects have introduced their
+ornaments (here is the fiddle out of tune again)--the cathedral is
+noble. A rich, tender sunshine is streaming in through the windows,
+and gilding the stately edifice with the purest light. The admirable
+stained-glass windows are not too brilliant in their colors. The
+organ is playing a rich, solemn music; some two hundred of people are
+listening to the service; and there is scarce one of the women kneeling
+on her chair, enveloped in her full majestic black drapery, that is
+not a fine study for a painter. These large black mantles of heavy silk
+brought over the heads of the women, and covering their persons, fall
+into such fine folds of drapery, that they cannot help being picturesque
+and noble. See, kneeling by the side of two of those fine devout-looking
+figures, is a lady in a little twiddling Parisian hat and feather, in
+a little lace mantelet, in a tight gown and a bustle. She is almost as
+monstrous as yonder figure of the Virgin, in a hoop, and with a huge
+crown and a ball and a sceptre; and a bambino dressed in a little hoop,
+and in a little crown, round which are clustered flowers and pots of
+orange-trees, and before which many of the faithful are at prayer.
+Gentle clouds of incense come wafting through the vast edifice; and in
+the lulls of the music you hear the faint chant of the priest, and the
+silver tinkle of the bell.
+
+Six Englishmen, with the commissionaires, and the "Murray's Guide-books"
+in their hands, are looking at the "Descent from the Cross." Of this
+picture the "Guide-book" gives you orders how to judge. If it is the end
+of religious painting to express the religious sentiment, a hundred of
+inferior pictures must rank before Rubens. Who was ever piously affected
+by any picture of the master? He can depict a livid thief writhing upon
+the cross, sometimes a blond Magdalen weeping below it; but it is a
+Magdalen a very short time indeed after her repentance: her yellow
+brocades and flaring satins are still those which she wore when she was
+of the world; her body has not yet lost the marks of the feasting and
+voluptuousness in which she used to indulge, according to the legend.
+Not one of the Rubens's pictures among all the scores that decorate
+chapels and churches here, has the least tendency to purify, to touch
+the affections, or to awaken the feelings of religious respect and
+wonder. The "Descent from the Cross" is vast, gloomy, and awful; but the
+awe inspired by it is, as I take it, altogether material. He might have
+painted a picture of any criminal broken on the wheel, and the sensation
+inspired by it would have been precisely similar. Nor in a religious
+picture do you want the savoir-faire of the master to be always
+protruding itself; it detracts from the feeling of reverence, just as
+the thumping of cushion and the spouting of tawdry oratory does from
+a sermon: meek religion disappears, shouldered out of the desk by
+the pompous, stalwart, big-chested, fresh-colored, bushy-whiskered
+pulpiteer. Rubens's piety has always struck us as of this sort. If he
+takes a pious subject, it is to show you in what a fine way he, Peter
+Paul Rubens, can treat it. He never seems to doubt but that he is doing
+it a great honor. His "Descent from the Cross," and its accompanying
+wings and cover, are a set of puns upon the word Christopher, of which
+the taste is more odious than that of the hooped-petticoated Virgin
+yonder, with her artificial flowers, and her rings and brooches. The
+people who made an offering of that hooped petticoat did their best, at
+any rate; they knew no better. There is humility in that simple, quaint
+present; trustfulness and kind intention. Looking about at other altars,
+you see (much to the horror of pious Protestants) all sorts of queer
+little emblems hanging up under little pyramids of penny candles that
+are sputtering and flaring there. Here you have a silver arm, or
+a little gold toe, or a wax leg, or a gilt eye, signifying and
+commemorating cures that have been performed by the supposed
+intercession of the saint over whose chapel they hang. Well, although
+they are abominable superstitions, yet these queer little offerings seem
+to me to be a great deal more pious than Rubens's big pictures; just as
+is the widow with her poor little mite compared to the swelling Pharisee
+who flings his purse of gold into the plate.
+
+A couple of days of Rubens and his church pictures makes one thoroughly
+and entirely sick of him. His very genius and splendor pails upon one,
+even taking the pictures as worldly pictures. One grows weary of being
+perpetually feasted with this rich, coarse, steaming food. Considering
+them as church pictures, I don't want to go to church to hear, however
+splendid, an organ play the "British Grenadiers."
+
+
+The Antwerpians have set up a clumsy bronze statue of their divinity
+in a square of the town; and those who have not enough of Rubens in the
+churches may study him, and indeed to much greater advantage, in a good,
+well-lighted museum. Here, there is one picture, a dying saint taking
+the communion, a large piece ten or eleven feet high, and painted in an
+incredibly short space of time, which is extremely curious indeed
+for the painter's study. The picture is scarcely more than an immense
+magnificent sketch; but it tells the secret of the artist's manner,
+which, in the midst of its dash and splendor, is curiously methodical.
+Where the shadows are warm the lights are cold, and vice versa; and the
+picture has been so rapidly painted, that the tints lie raw by the side
+of one another, the artist not having taken the trouble to blend them.
+
+There are two exquisite Vandykes (whatever Sir Joshua may say of them),
+and in which the very management of the gray tones which the President
+abuses forms the principal excellence and charm. Why, after all, are we
+not to have our opinion? Sir Joshua is not the Pope. The color of one
+of those Vandykes is as fine as FINE Paul Veronese, and the sentiment
+beautifully tender and graceful.
+
+I saw, too, an exhibition of the modern Belgian artists (1843), the
+remembrance of whose pictures after a month's absence has almost
+entirely vanished. Wappers's hand, as I thought, seemed to have grown
+old and feeble, Verboeckhoven's cattle-pieces are almost as good as
+Paul Potter's, and Keyser has dwindled down into namby-pamby prettiness,
+pitiful to see in the gallant young painter who astonished the Louvre
+artists ten years ago by a hand almost as dashing and ready as that of
+Rubens himself. There were besides many caricatures of the new German
+school, which are in themselves caricatures of the masters before
+Raphael.
+
+
+An instance of honesty may be mentioned here with applause. The
+writer lost a pocket-book containing a passport and a couple of modest
+ten-pound notes. The person who found the portfolio ingeniously put it
+into the box of the post-office, and it was faithfully restored to the
+owner; but somehow the two ten-pound notes were absent. It was, however,
+a great comfort to get the passport, and the pocket-book, which must be
+worth about ninepence.
+
+
+BRUSSELS.
+
+It was night when we arrived by the railroad from Antwerp at Brussels;
+the route is very pretty and interesting, and the flat countries
+through which the road passes in the highest state of peaceful, smiling
+cultivation. The fields by the roadside are enclosed by hedges as in
+England, the harvest was in part down, and an English country gentleman
+who was of our party pronounced the crops to be as fine as any he had
+ever seen. Of this matter a Cockney cannot judge accurately, but any man
+can see with what extraordinary neatness and care all these little plots
+of ground are tilled, and admire the richness and brilliancy of the
+vegetation. Outside of the moat of Antwerp, and at every village by
+which we passed, it was pleasant to see the happy congregations of
+well-clad people that basked in the evening sunshine, and soberly smoked
+their pipes and drank their Flemish beer. Men who love this drink must,
+as I fancy, have something essentially peaceful in their composition,
+and must be more easily satisfied than folks on our side of the water.
+The excitement of Flemish beer is, indeed, not great. I have tried both
+the white beer and the brown; they are both of the kind which schoolboys
+denominate "swipes," very sour and thin to the taste, but served, to be
+sure, in quaint Flemish jugs that do not seem to have changed their
+form since the days of Rubens, and must please the lovers of antiquarian
+knick-knacks. Numbers of comfortable-looking women and children sat
+beside the head of the family upon the tavern-benches, and it was
+amusing to see one little fellow of eight years old smoking, with much
+gravity, his father's cigar. How the worship of the sacred plant of
+tobacco has spread through all Europe! I am sure that the persons who
+cry out against the use of it are guilty of superstition and unreason,
+and that it would be a proper and easy task for scientific persons
+to write an encomium upon the weed. In solitude it is the pleasantest
+companion possible, and in company never de trop. To a student it
+suggests all sorts of agreeable thoughts, it refreshes the brain when
+weary, and every sedentary cigar-smoker will tell you how much good he
+has had from it, and how he has been able to return to his labor, after
+a quarter of an hour's mild interval of the delightful leaf of Havana.
+Drinking has gone from among us since smoking came in. It is a wicked
+error to say that smokers are drunkards; drink they do, but of gentle
+diluents mostly, for fierce stimulants of wine or strong liquors are
+abhorrent to the real lover of the Indian weed. Ah! my Juliana, join
+not in the vulgar cry that is raised against us. Cigars and cool drinks
+beget quiet conversations, good-humor, meditation; not hot blood such as
+mounts into the head of drinkers of apoplectic port or dangerous claret.
+Are we not more moral and reasonable than our forefathers? Indeed I
+think so somewhat; and many improvements of social life and converse
+must date with the introduction of the pipe.
+
+We were a dozen tobacco-consumers in the wagon of the train that brought
+us from Antwerp; nor did the women of the party (sensible women!) make a
+single objection to the fumigation. But enough of this; only let me add,
+in conclusion, that an excellent Israelitish gentleman, Mr. Hartog
+of Antwerp, supplies cigars for a penny apiece, such as are not to be
+procured in London for four times the sum.
+
+Through smiling corn-fields, then, and by little woods from which rose
+here and there the quaint peaked towers of some old-fashioned chateaux,
+our train went smoking along at thirty miles an hour. We caught a
+glimpse of Mechlin steeple, at first dark against the sunset, and
+afterwards bright as we came to the other side of it, and admired long
+glistening canals or moats that surrounded the queer old town, and were
+lighted up in that wonderful way which the sun only understands, and
+not even Mr. Turner, with all his vermilion and gamboge, can put down
+on canvas. The verdure was everywhere astonishing, and we fancied we saw
+many golden Cuyps as we passed by these quiet pastures.
+
+Steam-engines and their accompaniments, blazing forges, gaunt
+manufactories, with numberless windows and long black chimneys, of
+course take away from the romance of the place but, as we whirled into
+Brussels, even these engines had a fine appearance. Three or four of the
+snorting, galloping monsters had just finished their journey, and there
+was a quantity of flaming ashes lying under the brazen bellies of each
+that looked properly lurid and demoniacal. The men at the station came
+out with flaming torches--awful-looking fellows indeed! Presently the
+different baggage was handed out, and in the very worst vehicle I ever
+entered, and at the very slowest pace, we were borne to the "Hotel de
+Suede," from which house of entertainment this letter is written.
+
+We strolled into the town, but, though the night was excessively fine
+and it was not yet eleven o'clock, the streets of the little capital
+were deserted, and the handsome blazing cafes round about the theatres
+contained no inmates. Ah, what a pretty sight is the Parisian Boulevard
+on a night like this! how many pleasant hours has one passed in watching
+the lights, and the hum, and the stir, and the laughter of those happy,
+idle people! There was none of this gayety here; nor was there a person
+to be found, except a skulking commissioner or two (whose real name
+in French is that of a fish that is eaten with fennel-sauce), and who
+offered to conduct us to certain curiosities in the town. What must we
+English not have done, that in every town in Europe we are to be fixed
+upon by scoundrels of this sort; and what a pretty reflection it is on
+our country that such rascals find the means of living on us!
+
+
+Early the next morning we walked through a number of streets in the
+place, and saw certain sights. The Park is very pretty, and all the
+buildings round about it have an air of neatness--almost of stateliness.
+The houses are tall, the streets spacious, and the roads extremely
+clean. In the Park is a little theatre, a cafe somewhat ruinous, a
+little palace for the king of this little kingdom, some smart public
+buildings (with S. P. Q. B. emblazoned on them, at which pompous
+inscription one cannot help laughing), and other rows of houses somewhat
+resembling a little Rue de Rivoli. Whether from my own natural greatness
+and magnanimity, or from that handsome share of national conceit that
+every Englishman possesses, my impressions of this city are certainly
+anything but respectful. It has an absurd kind of Lilliput look with it.
+There are soldiers, just as in Paris, better dressed, and doing a vast
+deal of drumming and bustle; and yet, somehow, far from being frightened
+at them, I feel inclined to laugh in their faces. There are little
+Ministers, who work at their little bureaux; and to read the journals,
+how fierce they are! A great thundering Times could hardly talk more
+big. One reads about the rascally Ministers, the miserable Opposition,
+the designs of tyrants, the eyes of Europe, &c., just as one would
+in real journals. The Moniteur of Ghent belabors the Independent of
+Brussels; the Independent falls foul of the Lynx; and really it is
+difficult not to suppose sometimes that these worthy people are in
+earnest. And yet how happy were they sua si bona norint! Think what a
+comfort it would be to belong to a little state like this; not to abuse
+their privilege, but philosophically to use it. If I were a Belgian,
+I would not care one single fig about politics. I would not read
+thundering leading-articles. I would not have an opinion. What's the use
+of an opinion here? Happy fellows! do not the French, the English, and
+the Prussians, spare them the trouble of thinking, and make all their
+opinions for them? Think of living in a country free, easy, respectable,
+wealthy, and with the nuisance of talking politics removed from out of
+it. All this might the Belgians have, and a part do they enjoy, but not
+the best part; no, these people will be brawling and by the ears, and
+parties run as high here as at Stoke Pogis or little Pedlington.
+
+These sentiments were elicited by the reading of a paper at the cafe in
+the Park, where we sat under the trees for a while and sipped our cool
+lemonade. Numbers of statues decorate the place, the very worst I
+ever saw. These Cupids must have been erected in the time of the Dutch
+dynasty, as I judge from the immense posterior developments. Indeed the
+arts of the country are very low. The statues here, and the lions before
+the Prince of Orange's palace, would disgrace almost the figurehead of a
+ship.
+
+Of course we paid our visit to this little lion of Brussels (the
+Prince's palace, I mean). The architecture of the building is admirably
+simple and firm; and you remark about it, and all other works here, a
+high finish in doors, wood-works, paintings, &c., that one does not see
+in France, where the buildings are often rather sketched than completed,
+and the artist seems to neglect the limbs, as it were, and extremities
+of his figures.
+
+The finish of this little place is exquisite. We went through some dozen
+of state-rooms, paddling along over the slippery floors of inlaid woods
+in great slippers, without which we must have come to the ground. How
+did his Royal Highness the Prince of Orange manage when he lived here,
+and her Imperial Highness the Princess, and their excellencies the
+chamberlains and the footmen? They must have been on their tails many
+times a day, that's certain, and must have cut queer figures.
+
+The ball-room is beautiful--all marble, and yet with a comfortable,
+cheerful look; the other apartments are not less agreeable, and the
+people looked with intense satisfaction at some great lapis-lazuli
+tables, which the guide informed us were worth four millions, more or
+less; adding with a very knowing look, that they were un peu plus cher
+que l'or. This speech has a tremendous effect on visitors, and when we
+met some of our steamboat companions in the Park or elsewhere--in so
+small a place as this one falls in with them a dozen times a day--"Have
+you seen the tables?" was the general question. Prodigious tables are
+they, indeed! Fancy a table, my dear--a table four feet wide--a table
+with legs. Ye heavens! the mind can hardly picture to itself anything so
+beautiful and so tremendous!
+
+There are some good pictures in the palace, too, but not so
+extraordinarily good as the guide-books and the guide would have us
+to think. The latter, like most men of his class, is an ignoramus,
+who showed us an Andrea del Sarto (copy or original), and called it a
+Correggio, and made other blunders of a like nature. As is the case in
+England, you are hurried through the rooms without being allowed time
+to look at the pictures, and, consequently, to pronounce a satisfactory
+judgment on them.
+
+In the Museum more time was granted me, and I spent some hours with
+pleasure there. It is an absurd little gallery, absurdly imitating the
+Louvre, with just such compartments and pillars as you see in the noble
+Paris gallery; only here the pillars and capitals are stucco and
+white in place of marble and gold, and plaster-of-paris busts of great
+Belgians are placed between the pillars. An artist of the country
+has made a picture containing them, and you will be ashamed of your
+ignorance when you hear many of their names. Old Tilly of Magdeburg
+figures in one corner; Rubens, the endless Rubens, stands in the
+midst. What a noble countenance it is, and what a manly, swaggering
+consciousness of power!
+
+The picture to see here is a portrait, by the great Peter Paul, of one
+of the governesses of the Netherlands. It is just the finest portrait
+that ever was seen. Only a half-length, but such a majesty, such a
+force, such a splendor, such a simplicity about it! The woman is in a
+stiff black dress, with a ruff and a few pearls; a yellow curtain is
+behind her--the simplest arrangement that can be conceived; but this
+great man knew how to rise to his occasion; and no better proof can
+be shown of what a fine gentleman he was than this his homage to the
+vice-Queen. A common bungler would have painted her in her best clothes,
+with crown and sceptre, just as our Queen has been painted by--but
+comparisons are odious. Here stands this majestic woman in her every-day
+working-dress of black satin, LOOKING YOUR HAT OFF, as it were. Another
+portrait of the same personage hangs elsewhere in the gallery, and it is
+curious to observe the difference between the two, and see how a man of
+genius paints a portrait, and how a common limner executes it.
+
+Many more pictures are there here by Rubens, or rather from Rubens's
+manufactory,--odious and vulgar most of them are; fat Magdalens, coarse
+Saints, vulgar Virgins, with the scene-painter's tricks far too evident
+upon the canvas. By the side of one of the most astonishing color-pieces
+in the world, the "Worshipping of the Magi," is a famous picture of Paul
+Veronese that cannot be too much admired. As Rubens sought in the first
+picture to dazzle and astonish by gorgeous variety, Paul in his seems
+to wish to get his effect by simplicity, and has produced the most noble
+harmony that can be conceived. Many more works are there that merit
+notice,--a singularly clever, brilliant, and odious Jordaens, for
+example; some curious costume-pieces; one or two works by the Belgian
+Raphael, who was a very Belgian Raphael, indeed; and a long gallery
+of pictures of the very oldest school, that, doubtless, afford much
+pleasure to the amateurs of ancient art. I confess that I am inclined
+to believe in very little that existed before the time of Raphael.
+There is, for instance, the Prince of Orange's picture by Perugino, very
+pretty indeed, up to a certain point, but all the heads are repeated,
+all the drawing is bad and affected; and this very badness and
+affectation, is what the so-called Catholic school is always anxious to
+imitate. Nothing can be more juvenile or paltry than the works of the
+native Belgians here exhibited. Tin crowns are suspended over many
+of them, showing that the pictures are prize compositions: and pretty
+things, indeed, they are! Have you ever read an Oxford prize-poem! Well,
+these pictures are worse even than the Oxford poems--an awful assertion
+to make.
+
+In the matter of eating, dear sir, which is the next subject of the fine
+arts, a subject that, after many hours' walking, attracts a gentleman
+very much, let me attempt to recall the transactions of this very day at
+the table-d'-hote. 1, green pea-soup; 2, boiled salmon; 3, mussels; 4,
+crimped skate; 5, roast-meat; 6, patties; 7, melons; 8, carp, stewed
+with mushrooms and onions; 9, roast-turkey; 10, cauliflower and butter;
+11, fillets of venison piques, with asafoetida sauce; 12, stewed
+calf's-ear; 13, roast-veal; 14, roast-lamb; 15, stewed cherries;
+16, rice-pudding; 17, Gruyere cheese, and about twenty-four cakes of
+different kinds. Except 5, 13, and 14, I give you my word I ate of all
+written down here, with three rolls of bread and a score of potatoes.
+What is the meaning of it? How is the stomach of man to be brought to
+desire and to receive all this quantity? Do not gastronomists complain
+of heaviness in London after eating a couple of mutton-chops? Do not
+respectable gentlemen fall asleep in their arm-chairs? Are they fit for
+mental labor? Far from it. But look at the difference here: after dinner
+here one is as light as a gossamer. One walks with pleasure, reads with
+pleasure, writes with pleasure--nay, there is the supper-bell going at
+ten o'clock, and plenty of eaters, too. Let lord mayors and aldermen
+look to it, this fact of the extraordinary increase of appetite in
+Belgium, and, instead of steaming to Blackwall, come a little further to
+Antwerp.
+
+Of ancient architectures in the place, there is a fine old Port de
+Halle, which has a tall, gloomy, bastille look; a most magnificent
+town-hall, that has been sketched a thousand of times, and opposite
+it, a building that I think would be the very model for a Conservative
+club-house in London. Oh! how charming it would be to be a great
+painter, and give the character of the building, and the numberless
+groups round about it. The booths lighted up by the sun, the
+market-women in their gowns of brilliant hue, each group having a
+character and telling its little story, the troops of men lolling in all
+sorts of admirable attitudes of ease round the great lamp. Half a dozen
+light-blue dragoons are lounging about, and peeping over the artist as
+the drawing is made, and the sky is more bright and blue than one sees
+it in a hundred years in London.
+
+The priests of the country are a remarkably well-fed and respectable
+race, without that scowling, hang-dog look which one has remarked
+among reverend gentlemen in the neighboring country of France. Their
+reverences wear buckles to their shoes, light-blue neck-cloths, and
+huge three-cornered hats in good condition. To-day, strolling by the
+cathedral, I heard the tinkling of a bell in the street, and beheld
+certain persons, male and female, suddenly plump down on their knees
+before a little procession that was passing. Two men in black held a
+tawdry red canopy, a priest walked beneath it holding the sacrament
+covered with a cloth, and before him marched a couple of little
+altar-boys in short white surplices, such as you see in Rubens, and
+holding lacquered lamps. A small train of street-boys followed the
+procession, cap in hand, and the clergyman finally entered a hospital
+for old women, near the church, the canopy and the lamp-bearers
+remaining without.
+
+It was a touching scene, and as I stayed to watch it, I could not but
+think of the poor old soul who was dying within, listening to the last
+words of prayer, led by the hand of the priest to the brink of the black
+fathomless grave. How bright the sun was shining without all the time,
+and how happy and careless every thing around us looked!
+
+
+The Duke d'Arenberg has a picture-gallery worthy of his princely house.
+It does not contain great pieces, but tit-bits of pictures, such as suit
+an aristocratic epicure. For such persons a great huge canvas is too
+much, it is like sitting down alone to a roasted ox; and they do wisely,
+I think, to patronize small, high-flavored, delicate morceaux, such as
+the Duke has here.
+
+Among them may be mentioned, with special praise, a magnificent small
+Rembrandt, a Paul Potter of exceeding minuteness and beauty, an Ostade,
+which reminds one of Wilkie's early performances, and a Dusart quite
+as good as Ostade. There is a Berghem, much more unaffected than that
+artist's works generally are; and, what is more, precious in the eyes of
+many ladies as an object of art, there is, in one of the grand saloons,
+some needlework done by the Duke's own grandmother, which is looked at
+with awe by those admitted to see the palace.
+
+The chief curiosity, if not the chief ornament of a very elegant
+library, filled with vases and bronzes, is a marble head, supposed to
+be the original head of the Laocoon. It is, unquestionably a finer head
+than that which at present figures upon the shoulders of the famous
+statue. The expression of woe is more manly and intense; in the group as
+we know it, the head of the principal figure has always seemed to me to
+be a grimace of grief, as are the two accompanying young gentlemen
+with their pretty attitudes, and their little silly, open-mouthed
+despondency. It has always had upon me the effect of a trick, that
+statue, and not of a piece of true art. It would look well in the vista
+of a garden; it is not august enough for a temple, with all its jerks
+and twirls, and polite convulsions. But who knows what susceptibilities
+such a confession may offend? Let us say no more about the Laocoon, nor
+its head, nor its tail. The Duke was offered its weight in gold, they
+say, for this head, and refused. It would be a shame to speak ill of
+such a treasure, but I have my opinion of the man who made the offer.
+
+In the matter of sculpture almost all the Brussels churches are
+decorated with the most laborious wooden pulpits, which may be worth
+their weight in gold, too, for what I know, including his reverence
+preaching inside. At St. Gudule the preacher mounts into no less a place
+than the garden of Eden, being supported by Adam and Eve, by Sin and
+Death, and numberless other animals; he walks up to his desk by a
+rustic railing of flowers, fruits, and vegetables, with wooden peacocks,
+paroquets, monkeys biting apples, and many more of the birds and
+beasts of the field. In another church the clergyman speaks from out a
+hermitage; in a third from a carved palm-tree, which supports a set of
+oak clouds that form the canopy of the pulpit, and are, indeed, not much
+heavier in appearance than so many huge sponges. A priest, however tall
+or stout, must be lost in the midst of all these queer gimcracks; in
+order to be consistent, they ought to dress him up, too, in some odd
+fantastical suit. I can fancy the Cure of Meudon preaching out of such a
+place, or the Rev. Sydney Smith, or that famous clergyman of the time of
+the League, who brought all Paris to laugh and listen to him.
+
+
+But let us not be too supercilious and ready to sneer. It is only bad
+taste. It may have been very true devotion which erected these strange
+edifices.
+
+
+
+
+II.--GHENT--BRUGES.
+
+
+GHENT. (1840.)
+
+
+The Beguine College or Village is one of the most extraordinary sights
+that all Europe can show. On the confines of the town of Ghent you come
+upon an old-fashioned brick gate, that seems as if it were one of the
+city barriers; but, on passing it, one of the prettiest sights possible
+meets the eye: At the porter's lodge you see an old lady, in black and
+a white hood, occupied over her book; before you is a red church with a
+tall roof and fantastical Dutch pinnacles, and all around it rows upon
+rows of small houses, the queerest, neatest, nicest that ever were seen
+(a doll's house is hardly smaller or prettier). Right and left, on each
+side of little alleys, these little mansions rise; they have a courtlet
+before them, in which some green plants or hollyhocks are growing;
+and to each house is a gate, that has mostly a picture or queer-carved
+ornament upon or about it, and bears the name, not of the Beguine who
+inhabits it, but of the saint to whom she may have devoted it--the house
+of St. Stephen, the house of St. Donatus, the English or Angel Convent,
+and so on. Old ladies in black are pacing in the quiet alleys here and
+there, and drop the stranger a curtsy as he passes them and takes off
+his hat. Never were such patterns of neatness seen as these old ladies
+and their houses. I peeped into one or two of the chambers, of which the
+windows were open to the pleasant evening sun, and saw beds scrupulously
+plain, a quaint old chair or two, and little pictures of favorite saints
+decorating the spotless white walls. The old ladies kept up a quick,
+cheerful clatter, as they paused to gossip at the gates of their little
+domiciles; and with a great deal of artifice, and lurking behind walls,
+and looking at the church as if I intended to design that, I managed to
+get a sketch of a couple of them.
+
+
+But what white paper can render the whiteness of their linen; what black
+ink can do justice to the lustre of their gowns and shoes? Both of the
+ladies had a neat ankle and a tight stocking; and I fancy that heaven
+is quite as well served in this costume as in the dress of a scowling,
+stockingless friar, whom I had seen passing just before. The look and
+dress of the man made me shudder. His great red feet were bound up in
+a shoe open at the toes, a kind of compromise for a sandal. I had just
+seen him and his brethren at the Dominican Church, where a mass of music
+was sung, and orange-trees, flags, and banners decked the aisle of the
+church.
+
+One begins to grow sick of these churches, and the hideous exhibitions
+of bodily agonies that are depicted on the sides of all the chapels.
+Into one wherein we went this morning was what they called a Calvary: a
+horrible, ghastly image of a Christ in a tomb, the figure of the natural
+size, and of the livid color of death; gaping red wounds on the body and
+round the brows: the whole piece enough to turn one sick, and fit only
+to brutalize the beholder of it. The Virgin is commonly represented with
+a dozen swords stuck in her heart; bleeding throats of headless John
+Baptists are perpetually thrust before your eyes. At the Cathedral
+gate was a papier-mache church-ornament shop--most of the carvings and
+reliefs of the same dismal character: one, for instance, represented
+a heart with a great gash in it, and a double row of large blood-drops
+dribbling from it; nails and a knife were thrust into the heart; round
+the whole was a crown of thorns. Such things are dreadful to think of.
+The same gloomy spirit which made a religion of them, and worked upon
+the people by the grossest of all means, terror, distracted the natural
+feelings of man to maintain its power--shut gentle women into
+lonely, pitiless convents--frightened poor peasants with tales
+of torment--taught that the end and labor of life was silence,
+wretchedness, and the scourge--murdered those by fagot and prison
+who thought otherwise. How has the blind and furious bigotry of man
+perverted that which God gave us as our greatest boon, and bid us hate
+where God bade us love! Thank heaven that monk has gone out of sight! It
+is pleasant to look at the smiling, cheerful old Beguine, and think no
+more of yonder livid face.
+
+One of the many convents in this little religious city seems to be the
+specimen-house, which is shown to strangers, for all the guides conduct
+you thither, and I saw in a book kept for the purpose the names of
+innumerable Smiths and Joneses registered.
+
+A very kind, sweet-voiced, smiling nun (I wonder, do they always choose
+the most agreeable and best-humored sister of the house to show it to
+strangers?) came tripping down the steps and across the flags of the
+little garden-court, and welcomed us with much courtesy into the neat
+little old-fashioned, red-bricked, gable-ended, shining-windowed Convent
+of the Angels. First she showed us a whitewashed parlor, decorated with
+a grim picture or two and some crucifixes and other religious emblems,
+where, upon stiff old chairs, the sisters sit and work. Three or four of
+them were still there, pattering over their laces and bobbins; but the
+chief part of the sisterhood were engaged in an apartment hard by, from
+which issued a certain odor which I must say resembled onions: it was in
+fact the kitchen of the establishment.
+
+Every Beguine cooks her own little dinner in her own little pipkin; and
+there was half a score of them, sure enough, busy over their pots and
+crockery, cooking a repast which, when ready, was carried off to a
+neighboring room, the refectory, where, at a ledge-table which is drawn
+out from under her own particular cupboard, each nun sits down and
+eats her meal in silence. More religious emblems ornamented the carved
+cupboard-doors, and within, everything was as neat as neat could be:
+shining pewter-ewers and glasses, snug baskets of eggs and pats of
+butter, and little bowls with about a farthing's-worth of green tea in
+them--for some great day of fete, doubtless. The old ladies sat round
+as we examined these things, each eating soberly at her ledge and never
+looking round. There was a bell ringing in the chapel hard by. "Hark!"
+said our guide, "that is one of the sisters dying. Will you come up and
+see the cells?"
+
+The cells, it need not be said, are the snuggest little nests in the
+world, with serge-curtained beds and snowy linen, and saints and martyrs
+pinned against the wall. "We may sit up till twelve o'clock, if we
+like," said the nun; "but we have no fire and candle, and so what's the
+use of sitting up? When we have said our prayers we are glad enough to
+go to sleep."
+
+I forget, although the good soul told us, how many times in the day,
+in public and in private, these devotions are made, but fancy that the
+morning service in the chapel takes place at too early an hour for most
+easy travellers. We did not fail to attend in the evening, when likewise
+is a general muster of the seven hundred, minus the absent and sick, and
+the sight is not a little curious and striking to a stranger.
+
+The chapel is a very big whitewashed place of worship, supported by half
+a dozen columns on either side, over each of which stands the statue
+of an Apostle, with his emblem of martyrdom. Nobody was as yet at the
+distant altar, which was too far off to see very distinctly; but I could
+perceive two statues over it, one of which (St. Laurence, no doubt) was
+leaning upon a huge gilt gridiron that the sun lighted up in a blaze--a
+painful but not a romantic instrument of death. A couple of old ladies
+in white hoods were tugging and swaying about at two bell-ropes that
+came down into the middle of the church, and at least five hundred
+others in white veils were seated all round about us in mute
+contemplation until the service began, looking very solemn, and white,
+and ghastly, like an army of tombstones by moonlight.
+
+The service commenced as the clock finished striking seven: the organ
+pealed out, a very cracked and old one, and presently some weak old
+voice from the choir overhead quavered out a canticle; which done,
+a thin old voice of a priest at the altar far off (and which had now
+become quite gloomy in the sunset) chanted feebly another part of the
+service; then the nuns warbled once more overhead; and it was curious to
+hear, in the intervals of the most lugubrious chants, how the organ went
+off with some extremely cheerful military or profane air. At one time
+was a march, at another a quick tune; which ceasing, the old nuns began
+again, and so sung until the service was ended.
+
+In the midst of it one of the white-veiled sisters approached us with a
+very mysterious air, and put down her white veil close to our ears and
+whispered. Were we doing anything wrong, I wondered? Were they come to
+that part of the service where heretics and infidels ought to quit the
+church? What have you to ask, O sacred, white-veiled maid?
+
+All she said was, "Deux centiemes pour les suisses," which sum was paid;
+and presently the old ladies, rising from their chairs one by one, came
+in face of the altar, where they knelt down and said a short prayer;
+then, rising, unpinned their veils, and folded them up all exactly in
+the same folds and fashion, and laid them square like napkins on their
+heads, and tucked up their long black outer dresses, and trudged off to
+their convents.
+
+The novices wear black veils, under one of which I saw a young, sad,
+handsome face; it was the only thing in the establishment that was
+the least romantic or gloomy: and, for the sake of any reader of a
+sentimental turn, let us hope that the poor soul has been crossed in
+love, and that over some soul-stirring tragedy that black curtain has
+fallen.
+
+Ghent has, I believe, been called a vulgar Venice. It contains dirty
+canals and old houses that must satisfy the most eager antiquary, though
+the buildings are not quite in so good preservation as others that may
+be seen in the Netherlands. The commercial bustle of the place seems
+considerable, and it contains more beer-shops than any city I ever saw.
+
+These beer-shops seem the only amusement of the inhabitants, until,
+at least, the theatre shall be built, of which the elevation is now
+complete, a very handsome and extensive pile. There are beer-shops in
+the cellars of the houses, which are frequented, it is to be presumed,
+by the lower sort; there are beer-shops at the barriers, where the
+citizens and their families repair; and beer-shops in the town, glaring
+with gas, with long gauze blinds, however, to hide what I hear is a
+rather questionable reputation.
+
+Our inn, the "Hotel of the Post," a spacious and comfortable residence,
+is on a little place planted round with trees, and that seems to be the
+Palais Royal of the town. Three clubs, which look from without to
+be very comfortable, ornament this square with their gas-lamps. Here
+stands, too, the theatre that is to be; there is a cafe, and on evenings
+a military band plays the very worst music I ever remember to have
+heard. I went out to-night to take a quiet walk upon this place, and the
+horrid brazen discord of these trumpeters set me half mad.
+
+I went to the cafe for refuge, passing on the way a subterraneous
+beer-shop, where men and women were drinking to the sweet music of a
+cracked barrel-organ. They take in a couple of French papers at this
+cafe, and the same number of Belgian journals. You may imagine how well
+the latter are informed, when you hear that the battle of Boulogne,
+fought by the immortal Louis Napoleon, was not known here until some
+gentlemen out of Norfolk brought the news from London, and until it had
+travelled to Paris, and from Paris to Brussels. For a whole hour I could
+not get a newspaper at the cafe. The horrible brass band in the meantime
+had quitted the place, and now, to amuse the Ghent citizens, a couple of
+little boys came to the cafe and set up a small concert: one played ill
+on the guitar, but sang, very sweetly, plaintive French ballads; the
+other was the comic singer; he carried about with him a queer, long,
+damp-looking, mouldy white hat, with no brim. "Ecoutez," said the waiter
+to me, "il va faire l'Anglais; c'est tres drole!" The little rogue
+mounted his immense brimless hat, and, thrusting his thumbs into the
+armholes of his waistcoat, began to faire l'Anglais, with a song in
+which swearing was the principal joke. We all laughed at this, and
+indeed the little rascal seemed to have a good deal of humor.
+
+How they hate us, these foreigners, in Belgium as much as in France!
+What lies they tell of us; how gladly they would see us humiliated!
+Honest folks at home over their port-wine say, "Ay, ay, and very good
+reason they have too. National vanity, sir, wounded--we have beaten them
+so often." My dear sir, there is not a greater error in the world
+than this. They hate you because you are stupid, hard to please,
+and intolerably insolent and air-giving. I walked with an Englishman
+yesterday, who asked the way to a street of which he pronounced the name
+very badly to a little Flemish boy: the Flemish boy did not answer; and
+there was my Englishman quite in a rage, shrieking in the child's ear
+as if he must answer. He seemed to think that it was the duty of "the
+snob," as he called him, to obey the gentleman. This is why we are
+hated--for pride. In our free country a tradesman, a lackey, or a
+waiter will submit to almost any given insult from a gentleman: in these
+benighted lands one man is as good as another; and pray God it may soon
+be so with us! Of all European people, which is the nation that has the
+most haughtiness, the strongest prejudices, the greatest reserve, the
+greatest dulness? I say an Englishman of the genteel classes. An honest
+groom jokes and hobs-and-nobs and makes his way with the kitchen-maids,
+for there is good social nature in the man; his master dare not unbend.
+Look at him, how he scowls at you on your entering an inn-room; think
+how you scowl yourself to meet his scowl. To-day, as we were walking and
+staring about the place, a worthy old gentleman in a carriage, seeing a
+pair of strangers, took off his hat and bowed very gravely with his
+old powdered head out of the window: I am sorry to say that our first
+impulse was to burst out laughing--it seemed so supremely ridiculous
+that a stranger should notice and welcome another.
+
+As for the notion that foreigners hate us because we have beaten them
+so often, my dear sir, this is the greatest error in the world:
+well-educated Frenchmen DO NOT BELIEVE THAT WE HAVE BEATEN THEM. A man
+was once ready to call me out in Paris because I said that we had beaten
+the French in Spain; and here before me is a French paper, with a
+London correspondent discoursing about Louis Buonaparte and his jackass
+expedition to Boulogne. "He was received at Eglintoun, it is true," says
+the correspondent, "but what do you think was the reason? Because the
+English nobility were anxious to revenge upon his person (with some
+coups de lance) the checks which the 'grand homme' his uncle had
+inflicted on us in Spain."
+
+This opinion is so general among the French, that they would laugh at
+you with scornful incredulity if you ventured to assert any other. Foy's
+history of the Spanish War does not, unluckily, go far enough. I have
+read a French history which hardly mentions the war in Spain, and calls
+the battle of Salamanca a French victory. You know how the other day,
+and in the teeth of all evidence, the French swore to their victory of
+Toulouse: and so it is with the rest; and you may set it down as pretty
+certain, 1st, That only a few people know the real state of things in
+France, as to the matter in dispute between us; 2nd, That those who do,
+keep the truth to themselves, and so it is as if it had never been.
+
+These Belgians have caught up, and quite naturally, the French tone.
+We are perfide Albion with them still. Here is the Ghent paper, which
+declares that it is beyond a doubt that Louis Napoleon was sent by the
+English and Lord Palmerston; and though it states in another part of
+the journal (from English authority) that the Prince had never seen Lord
+Palmerston, yet the lie will remain uppermost--the people and the editor
+will believe it to the end of time. . . . See to what a digression
+yonder little fellow in the tall hat has given rise! Let us make his
+picture, and have done with him.
+
+
+I could not understand, in my walks about this place, which is certainly
+picturesque enough, and contains extraordinary charms in the shape of
+old gables, quaint spires, and broad shining canals--I could not at
+first comprehend why, for all this, the town was especially disagreeable
+to me, and have only just hit on the reason why. Sweetest Juliana, you
+will never guess it: it is simply this, that I have not seen a single
+decent-looking woman in the whole place; they look all ugly, with coarse
+mouths, vulgar figures, mean mercantile faces; and so the traveller
+walking among them finds the pleasure of his walk excessively damped,
+and the impressions made upon him disagreeable.
+
+In the Academy there are no pictures of merit; but sometimes a
+second-rate picture is as pleasing as the best, and one may pass an hour
+here very pleasantly. There is a room appropriated to Belgian artists,
+of which I never saw the like: they are, like all the rest of the things
+in this country, miserable imitations of the French school--great nude
+Venuses, and Junos a la David, with the drawing left out.
+
+
+BRUGES.
+
+The change from vulgar Ghent, with its ugly women and coarse bustle,
+to this quiet, old, half-deserted, cleanly Bruges, was very pleasant. I
+have seen old men at Versailles, with shabby coats and pigtails, sunning
+themselves on the benches in the walls; they had seen better days, to be
+sure, but they were gentlemen still: and so we found, this morning, old
+dowager Bruges basking in the pleasant August sun, and looking if not
+prosperous, at least cheerful and well-bred. It is the quaintest and
+prettiest of all the quaint and pretty towns I have seen. A painter
+might spend months here, and wander from church to church, and admire
+old towers and pinnacles, tall gables, bright canals, and pretty little
+patches of green garden and moss-grown wall, that reflect in the clear
+quiet water. Before the inn-window is a garden, from which in the early
+morning issues a most wonderful odor of stocks and wallflowers; next
+comes a road with trees of admirable green; numbers of little children
+are playing in this road (the place is so clean that they may roll in it
+all day without soiling their pinafores), and on the other side of the
+trees are little old-fashioned, dumpy, whitewashed, red-tiled houses. A
+poorer landscape to draw never was known, nor a pleasanter to see--the
+children especially, who are inordinately fat and rosy. Let it be
+remembered, too, that here we are out of the country of ugly women: the
+expression of the face is almost uniformly gentle and pleasing, and the
+figures of the women, wrapped in long black monk-like cloaks and hoods,
+very picturesque. No wonder there are so many children: the "Guide-book"
+(omniscient Mr. Murray!) says there are fifteen thousand paupers in the
+town, and we know how such multiply. How the deuce do their children
+look so fat and rosy? By eating dirt-pies, I suppose. I saw a couple
+making a very nice savory one, and another employed in gravely sticking
+strips of stick betwixt the pebbles at the house-door, and so making for
+herself a stately garden. The men and women don't seem to have much more
+to do. There are a couple of tall chimneys at either suburb of the town,
+where no doubt manufactories are at work, but within the walls everybody
+seems decently idle.
+
+We have been, of course, abroad to visit the lions. The tower in the
+Grand Place is very fine, and the bricks of which it is built do not
+yield a whit in color to the best stone. The great building round this
+tower is very like the pictures of the Ducal Palace at Venice; and there
+is a long market area, with columns down the middle, from which hung
+shreds of rather lean-looking meat, that would do wonders under the
+hands of Cattermole or Haghe. In the tower there is a chime of bells
+that keep ringing perpetually. They not only play tunes of themselves,
+and every quarter of an hour, but an individual performs selections from
+popular operas on them at certain periods of the morning, afternoon, and
+evening. I have heard to-day "Suoni la Tromba," "Son Vergin Vezzosa,"
+from the "Puritani," and other airs, and very badly they were played
+too; for such a great monster as a tower-bell cannot be expected to
+imitate Madame Grisi or even Signor Lablache. Other churches indulge in
+the same amusement, so that one may come here and live in melody all day
+or night, like the young woman in Moore's "Lalla Rookh."
+
+In the matter of art, the chief attractions of Bruges are the pictures
+of Hemling, that are to be seen in the churches, the hospital, and the
+picture-gallery of the place. There are no more pictures of Rubens to
+be seen, and, indeed, in the course of a fortnight, one has had quite
+enough of the great man and his magnificent, swaggering canvases. What
+a difference is here with simple Hemling and the extraordinary creations
+of his pencil! The hospital is particularly rich in them; and the legend
+there is that the painter, who had served Charles the Bold in his war
+against the Swiss, and his last battle and defeat, wandered back wounded
+and penniless to Bruges, and here found cure and shelter.
+
+This hospital is a noble and curious sight. The great hall is almost
+as it was in the twelfth century; it is spanned by Saxon arches, and
+lighted by a multiplicity of Gothic windows of all sizes; it is very
+lofty, clean, and perfectly well ventilated; a screen runs across the
+middle of the room, to divide the male from the female patients, and we
+were taken to examine each ward, where the poor people seemed happier
+than possibly they would have been in health and starvation without it.
+Great yellow blankets were on the iron beds, the linen was scrupulously
+clean, glittering pewter-jugs and goblets stood by the side of each
+patient, and they were provided with godly books (to judge from
+the binding), in which several were reading at leisure. Honest old
+comfortable nuns, in queer dresses of blue, black, white, and flannel,
+were bustling through the room, attending to the wants of the sick. I
+saw about a dozen of these kind women's faces: one was young--all were
+healthy and cheerful. One came with bare blue arms and a great pile of
+linen from an outhouse--such a grange as Cedric the Saxon might have
+given to a guest for the night. A couple were in a laboratory, a tall,
+bright, clean room, 500 years old at least. "We saw you were not
+very religious," said one of the old ladies, with a red, wrinkled,
+good-humored face, "by your behavior yesterday in chapel." And yet
+we did not laugh and talk as we used at college, but were profoundly
+affected by the scene that we saw there. It was a fete-day: a mass of
+Mozart was sung in the evening--not well sung, and yet so exquisitely
+tender and melodious, that it brought tears into our eyes. There were
+not above twenty people in the church: all, save three or four, were
+women in long black cloaks. I took them for nuns at first. They were,
+however, the common people of the town, very poor indeed, doubtless,
+for the priest's box that was brought round was not added to by most of
+them, and their contributions were but two-cent pieces,--five of these
+go to a penny; but we know the value of such, and can tell the exact
+worth of a poor woman's mite! The box-bearer did not seem at first
+willing to accept our donation--we were strangers and heretics; however,
+I held out my hand, and he came perforce as it were. Indeed it had only
+a franc in it: but que voulez-vous? I had been drinking a bottle of
+Rhine wine that day, and how was I to afford more? The Rhine wine is
+dear in this country, and costs four francs a bottle.
+
+Well, the service proceeded. Twenty poor women, two Englishmen, four
+ragged beggars, cowering on the steps; and there was the priest at the
+altar, in a great robe of gold and damask, two little boys in white
+surplices serving him, holding his robe as he rose and bowed, and the
+money-gatherer swinging his censer, and filling the little chapel with
+smoke. The music pealed with wonderful sweetness; you could see the prim
+white heads of the nuns in their gallery. The evening light streamed
+down upon old statues of saints and carved brown stalls, and lighted up
+the head of the golden-haired Magdalen in a picture of the entombment
+of Christ. Over the gallery, and, as it were, a kind protectress to the
+poor below, stood the statue of the Virgin.
+
+
+
+
+III.--WATERLOO.
+
+
+It is, my dear, the happy privilege of your sex in England to quit the
+dinner-table after the wine-bottles have once or twice gone round it,
+and you are thereby saved (though, to be sure, I can't tell what the
+ladies do up stairs)--you are saved two or three hours' excessive
+dulness, which the men are obliged to go through.
+
+I ask any gentleman who reads this--the letters to my Juliana being
+written with an eye to publication--to remember especially how many
+times, how many hundred times, how many thousand times, in his hearing,
+the battle of Waterloo has been discussed after dinner, and to call to
+mind how cruelly he has been bored by the discussion. "Ah, it was lucky
+for us that the Prussians came up!" says one little gentleman, looking
+particularly wise and ominous. "Hang the Prussians!" (or, perhaps,
+something stronger "the Prussians!") says a stout old major on half-pay.
+"We beat the French without them, sir, as beaten them we always have!
+We were thundering down the hill of Belle Alliance, sir, at the backs
+of them, and the French were crying 'Sauve qui peut' long before the
+Prussians ever touched them!" And so the battle opens, and for many
+mortal hours, amid rounds of claret, rages over and over again.
+
+I thought to myself considering the above things, what a fine thing it
+will be in after-days to say that I have been to Brussels and never seen
+the field of Waterloo; indeed, that I am such a philosopher as not to
+care a fig about the battle--nay, to regret, rather, that when Napoleon
+came back, the British Government had not spared their men and left him
+alone.
+
+But this pitch of philosophy was unattainable. This morning, after
+having seen the Park, the fashionable boulevard, the pictures, the
+cafes--having sipped, I say, the sweets of every flower that grows in
+this paradise of Brussels, quite weary of the place, we mounted on a
+Namur diligence, and jingled off at four miles an hour for Waterloo.
+
+The road is very neat and agreeable: the Forest of Soignies here and
+there interposes pleasantly, to give your vehicle a shade; the country,
+as usual, is vastly fertile and well cultivated. A farmer and the
+conducteur were my companions in the imperial, and could I have
+understood their conversation, my dear, you should have had certainly a
+report of it. The jargon which they talked was, indeed, most queer and
+puzzling--French, I believe, strangely hashed up and pronounced, for
+here and there one could catch a few words of it. Now and anon, however,
+they condescended to speak in the purest French they could muster; and,
+indeed, nothing is more curious than to hear the French of the country.
+You can't understand why all the people insist upon speaking it so
+badly. I asked the conductor if he had been at the battle; he burst out
+laughing like a philosopher, as he was, and said "Pas si bete." I asked
+the farmer whether his contributions were lighter now than in King
+William's time, and lighter than those in the time of the Emperor? He
+vowed that in war-time he had not more to pay than in time of peace (and
+this strange fact is vouched for by every person of every nation),
+and being asked wherefore the King of Holland had been ousted from
+his throne, replied at once, "Parceque c'etoit un voleur:" for which
+accusation I believe there is some show of reason, his Majesty having
+laid hands on much Belgian property before the lamented outbreak which
+cost him his crown. A vast deal of laughing and roaring passed between
+these two worldly people and the postilion, whom they called "baron,"
+and I thought no doubt that this talk was one of the many jokes that my
+companions were in the habit of making. But not so: the postilion was an
+actual baron, the bearer of an ancient name, the descendant of gallant
+gentlemen. Good heavens! what would Mrs. Trollope say to see his
+lordship here? His father the old baron had dissipated the family
+fortune, and here was this young nobleman, at about five-and-forty,
+compelled to bestride a clattering Flemish stallion, and bump over dusty
+pavements at the rate of five miles an hour. But see the beauty of high
+blood: with what a calm grace the man of family accommodates himself to
+fortune. Far from being cast down, his lordship met his fate like a man:
+he swore and laughed the whole of the journey, and as we changed horses,
+condescended to partake of half a pint of Louvain beer, to which the
+farmer treated him--indeed the worthy rustic treated me to a glass too.
+
+Much delight and instruction have I had in the course of the journey
+from my guide, philosopher, and friend, the author of "Murray's
+Handbook." He has gathered together, indeed, a store of information,
+and must, to make his single volume, have gutted many hundreds of
+guide-books. How the Continental ciceroni must hate him, whoever he is!
+Every English party I saw had this infallible red book in their hands,
+and gained a vast deal of historical and general information from it.
+Thus I heard, in confidence, many remarkable anecdotes of Charles V.,
+the Duke of Alva, Count Egmont, all of which I had before perceived,
+with much satisfaction, not only in the "Handbook," but even in other
+works.
+
+The Laureate is among the English poets evidently the great favorite of
+our guide: the choice does honor to his head and heart. A man must have
+a very strong bent for poetry, indeed, who carries Southey's works in
+his portmanteau, and quotes them in proper time and occasion. Of course
+at Waterloo a spirit like our guide's cannot fail to be deeply moved,
+and to turn to his favorite poet for sympathy. Hark how the laureated
+bard sings about the tombstones at Waterloo:--
+
+         "That temple to our hearts was hallow'd now,
+            For many a wounded Briton there was laid,
+          With such for help as time might then allow,
+            From the fresh carnage of the field conveyed.
+          And they whom human succor could not save,
+            Here, in its precincts, found a hasty grave.
+          And here, on marble tablets, set on high,
+            In English lines by foreign workmen traced,
+          The names familiar to an English eye,
+            Their brethren here the fit memorial placed;
+          Whose unadorned inscriptions briefly tell
+            THEIR GALLANT COMRADES' rank, and where they fell.
+          The stateliest monument of human pride,
+            Enriched with all magnificence of art,
+          To honor chieftains who in victory died,
+            Would wake no stronger feeling in the heart
+          Than these plain tablets by the soldier's hand
+            Raised to his comrades in a foreign land."
+
+There are lines for you! wonderful for justice, rich in thought and
+novel ideas. The passage concerning their gallant comrades' rank should
+be specially remarked. There indeed they lie, sure enough: the Honorable
+Colonel This of the Guards, Captain That of the Hussars, Major So-and-So
+of the Dragoons, brave men and good, who did their duty by their country
+on that day, and died in the performance of it.
+
+Amen. But I confess fairly, that in looking at these tablets, I felt
+very much disappointed at not seeing the names of the MEN as well as the
+officers. Are they to be counted for nought? A few more inches of marble
+to each monument would have given space for all the names of the men;
+and the men of that day were the winners of the battle. We have a right
+to be as grateful individually to any given private as to any given
+officer; their duties were very much the same. Why should the country
+reserve its gratitude for the genteel occupiers of the army-list,
+and forget the gallant fellows whose humble names were written in the
+regimental books? In reading of the Wellington wars, and the conduct
+of the men engaged in them, I don't know whether to respect them or
+to wonder at them most. They have death, wounds, and poverty in
+contemplation; in possession, poverty, hard labor, hard fare, and
+small thanks. If they do wrong, they are handed over to the inevitable
+provost-marshal; if they are heroes, heroes they may be, but they
+remain privates still, handling the old brown-bess, starving on the old
+twopence a day. They grow gray in battle and victory, and after thirty
+years of bloody service, a young gentleman of fifteen, fresh from a
+preparatory school, who can scarcely read, and came but yesterday with a
+pinafore in to papa's dessert--such a young gentleman, I say, arrives
+in a spick-and-span red coat, and calmly takes the command over our
+veteran, who obeys him as if God and nature had ordained that so
+throughout time it should be.
+
+That privates should obey, and that they should be smartly punished if
+they disobey, this one can understand very well. But to say obey for
+ever and ever--to say that Private John Styles is, by some physical
+disproportion, hopelessly inferior to Cornet Snooks--to say that Snooks
+shall have honors, epaulets, and a marble tablet if he dies, and that
+Styles shall fight his fight, and have his twopence a day, and when
+shot down shall be shovelled into a hole with other Styleses, and so
+forgotten; and to think that we had in the course of the last war
+some 400,000 of these Styleses, and some 10,000, say, of the Snooks
+sort--Styles being by nature exactly as honest, clever, and brave as
+Snooks--and to think that the 400,000 should bear this, is the wonder!
+
+Suppose Snooks makes a speech. "Look at these Frenchmen, British
+soldiers," says he, "and remember who they are. Two-and-twenty years
+since they hurled their King from his throne and murdered him" (groans).
+"They flung out of their country their ancient and famous nobility--they
+published the audacious doctrine of equality--they made a cadet
+of artillery, a beggarly lawyer's son, into an Emperor, and took
+ignoramuses from the ranks--drummers and privates, by Jove!--of whom
+they made kings, generals, and marshals! Is this to be borne?" (Cries of
+"No! no!") "Upon them, my boys! down with these godless revolutionists,
+and rally round the British lion!"
+
+So saying, Ensign Snooks (whose flag, which he can't carry, is held by
+a huge grizzly color-sergeant,) draws a little sword, and pipes out a
+feeble huzza. The men of his company, roaring curses at the Frenchmen,
+prepare to receive and repel a thundering charge of French cuirassiers.
+The men fight, and Snooks is knighted because the men fought so well.
+
+But live or die, win or lose, what do THEY get? English glory is too
+genteel to meddle with those humble fellows. She does not condescend to
+ask the names of the poor devils whom she kills in her service. Why was
+not every private man's name written upon the stones in Waterloo Church
+as well as every officer's? Five hundred pounds to the stone-cutters
+would have served to carve the whole catalogue, and paid the poor
+compliment of recognition to men who died in doing their duty. If the
+officers deserved a stone, the men did. But come, let us away and drop a
+tear over the Marquis of Anglesea's leg!
+
+As for Waterloo, has it not been talked of enough after dinner? Here are
+some oats that were plucked before Hougoumont, where grow not only
+oats, but flourishing crops of grape-shot, bayonets, and legion-of-honor
+crosses, in amazing profusion.
+
+Well, though I made a vow not to talk about Waterloo either here or
+after dinner, there is one little secret admission that one must make
+after seeing it. Let an Englishman go and see that field, and he NEVER
+FORGETS IT. The sight is an event in his life; and, though it has been
+seen by millions of peaceable GENTS--grocers from Bond Street, meek
+attorneys from Chancery Lane, and timid tailors from Piccadilly--I will
+wager that there is not one of them but feels a glow as he looks at the
+place, and remembers that he, too, is an Englishman.
+
+It is a wrong, egotistical, savage, unchristian feeling, and that's
+the truth of it. A man of peace has no right to be dazzled by that
+red-coated glory, and to intoxicate his vanity with those remembrances
+of carnage and triumph. The same sentence which tells us that on earth
+there ought to be peace and good-will amongst men, tells us to whom
+GLORY belongs.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Little Travels and Roadside Sketches, by 
+William Makepeace Thackeray
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+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE TRAVELS ***
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