In The House Of The Lady Superior Is
Preserved The Small, But Very Splendid, Memorial Brass Of A Former
Inmate, Who Died At About The Middle Of The Fifteenth Century.
Wander where you will in the ancient streets of Bruges, and you
will not fail to discover everywhere some delightful relic of
antiquity, or to stumble at every street corner on some new and
charming combination of old houses, with their characteristic
crow-stepped, or corbie, gables.
New houses, I suppose, there must
really be by scores; but these, being built with inherent good
taste (whether unconscious or conscious I do not know) in the
traditional style of local building, and with brick that from the
first is mellow in tint and harmonizes with its setting,
assimilate at once with their neighbours to right and left, and
fail to offend the eye by any patchy appearance or crudeness.
Hardly a single street in Bruges is thus without old-world charm;
but the architectural heart of the city must be sought in its two
market-places, called respectively the Grande Place and the Place
du Bourg. In the former are the brick Halles, with their famous
belfry towering above the structure below it, with true Belgian
disregard for proportion in height. It looks, indeed, like tower
piled on tower, till one is almost afraid lest the final octagon
should be going to topple over! In the Place du Bourg is a less
aspiring group, consisting of the Hotel de Ville, the Chapelle du
Saint Sang, the Maison de l'Ancien Greffe, and the Palais de
Justice - all very Flemish in character, and all, in combination,
elaborately picturesque. In the Chapel of the Holy Blood is
preserved the crystal cylinder that is said to enshrine certain
drops of the blood of Our Saviour that were brought from the Holy
Land in 1149 by Theodoric, Count of Flanders, and installed in the
Romanesque chapel that he built for their reception, and the crypt
of which remains, though the upper chapel has long since been
rebuilt, in the fifteenth century. At certain stated times the
relic is exhibited to a crowd of devotees, who file slowly past to
kiss it. Some congealed blood of Our Lord is also said to be
preserved, after remarkable vicissitudes of loss and recovery, in
the Norman Abbey of Fecamp; and mediaeval Gloucestershire once
boasted as big a treasure, which brought great concourse and
popularity to the Cistercian house of Hayles. Pass beneath the
archway of the Maison de l'Ancien Greffe, cross the sluggish
canal, and turn sharply to the left, and follow, first the cobbled
Quai des Marbriers, and afterwards its continuation, the Quai
Vert. Pacing these silent promenades, which are bordered by humble
cottages, you have opposite, across the water, as also from the
adjacent Quai du Rosaire, grand groupings of pinnacle, tower, and
gable, more delightful even, in perfection of combination and in
mellow charm of colour, than those "domes and towers" of Oxford
whose presence Wordsworth confessed, in a very indifferent sonnet,
to overpower his "soberness of reason." "In Brussels," he says
elsewhere in his journal, "the modern taste in costume,
architecture, etc., has got the mastery; in Ghent there is a
struggle; but in Bruges old images are still paramount, and an air
of monastic life among the quiet goings-on of a thinly-peopled
city is inexpressibly soothing.
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