enjoying constitutional liberty, instead of being
incorporated by a nation for whom, whether
empire or republic, genuine rational liberty, as
we understand it, would seem to be for ever
a mirage.

Flanders, certainly, ought to be a fragmentary
land—a broken cake, one bit of which is in one
sovereign's pocket and another in another's;
and it is, paradoxically, a whole, as homogeneous
at bottom as a gentleman's estate within
a ring fence. It has been Spanish, Dutch, and
what not besides; it is now partly French and
partly Belgian; but to whomsoever it pays its
taxes, it remains Flemish to the backbone.

There is French Flanders, then, and Belgian
Flanders; but they are one natural tract which
an invisible boundary cannot separate. When
you have crossed out of France into Belgium,
you cannot believe that the move has been
really made till you find you get tobacco for
next to nothing, and have to pay turnpike tolls
before your carriage can pass. In other
respects the continuity is unbroken. There is
the same blunt, coarse, matter-of-fact language
which nobody ever thinks of learning, but
which anybody who knows something of
German may roughly understand; the language
which proves its relationship to English by all
its naughty words coinciding with our own;
which startles you with syllables plainly spoken
or printed, which, with us, never meet ears or
eyes polite; a language whose "yah-yah"
conversation sounds something between a quack
and a neigh. What contrasted forms of speech
with French smooth-spokenness! France
displays, "Ici on donne à manger," "Here they
give to eat," on pothouse signs. The genius of
Flanders is content to tell you, "Hier verkoopt
men dranken," "Here they sell drink." The
same of manners. You are forbidden, in legible
black and white, to spit inside a Flemish church!
And the word for "spit"—excuse it, reader,
but etymology is deaf to delicate remonstrance
—is the mother of our (we have long since put
it in the lumber-room) "spew." In short,
what Teniers innocently painted, Flanders
innocently speaks, dreaming no harm. "Huis te
huren" for house to let, "gist" for yeast,
"browery" for brewery, "wolle" for wool,
"coke" for cake (plural "koeken"), and
scores of others, hardly require an English
interpreter.

The whole of Flanders, Belgian or French, is
a land of good living; a country of milk
and honey, butter and cheese, fat kine and
sleek beeves, and saddle-donkeys to go to
market with; a paradise of rich pastures and
tall trim trees, of hops, hop-poles, and cameline,
whose seed gives oil, and whose stalks make
brooms: of wealthy, thatch-roofed, one-storied
farms, the inner brickwork of whose windows,
painted sky-blue, gives you the idea of an
oriental lady with her eyelids stained; of little
dolls'-house chapels, and cream and eggs,
and paved roads; where native pebbles are
curiosities and stones are gems; with dust
in summer and mud in winter, as behoves a
region brought down by the streams and thrown
up by the sea.

And the carriages! Lumbrous, cumbrous
affairs; commodious enough when once you are
inside them, but all "built on Mount Ararat
after the subsidence of the waters," and only
draggable by horses with a touch of the
elephant in their framework. Look at that heavy
three-wheeled tumbrel! It contains timber
enough to build a small house. That waggon,
again, would carry a detachment of soldiers,
baggage, band, ammunition, and all. That
spherical yellow coach, called a "citrouille" or
gourd, is the Globe formerly in Leicester-square,
stuck upon wheels. What a colossal caricature
of Cinderella's pumpkin! Instead of just
holding one fairy-like damsel, it might have
played the part of the horse at the Siege of Troy.
And behold that wonderful, that phenomenal
carriage, which fills one corner of the roomy
inn-yard! It has seats inside, in tiers, exactly
like those of the pit at the play, ranged in three
rows, with a fop's-alley running up the middle, to
hold a public nine in number, sitting three
abreast—the whole rolling on only two but
most solid wheels, and drawn by two horses;
the object being (besides sociability) to avoid
the payment of one sou at each oft-recurring
turnpike-gate. A two-wheeled carriage pays
only three sous, while every four-wheeler
contributes four.

Religion in Flanders is of a piece with the
rest; heavy, material, costly, hearty, with
displays of money's worth amounting to
magnificence. Noble churches, gorgeous pictures,
elaborate carvings, splendid processions,
glittering banners, precious gems, conventual
communities, liberal restoration of ecclesiastical
buildings, strict abstinences, severe discipline,
bodily penances, such as kneeling on the bare
ground with the arms held out horizontally,
prayer measured by quantity and duration
instead of by fervour and devotion, soul-stripping
confession, self-inflicted punishment, and
clumsy emblems are all the very reverse of
spiritual and refined forms of faith and worship.

These characteristics harmonise with the
nature of the land. Their accordance strikes
you all the more from the evident discordance
of other things which have no right to intrude
their presence. While the bowery roads, with
their central pavement, are all that can be
wished in point of fitness; fir-trees and pines
are singularly out of place in a highly cultivated
agricultural plain. It is almost by compulsion
and necessity that the Flemings derive beauty
out of irregularity. The monotonous level of
their fertile soil leads them to seek variety in
broken forms, unsymmetrical areas, wedge-
shaped gable-ends, stories of unequal height,
windows and doors with none corresponding to
them. The result is that a country, naturally
the most unpicturesque, abounds with the most
picturesque of objects.

In consequence, perhaps, of their restricted
language—which confines them within a few
square leagues as tightly as a tether fastens a