Such excessive luxury naturally led to great corruption of manners and the commission of terrible crimes.  During the reign of Philip de Male, there were committed in the city of Ghent and its outskirts, in less than a year, above fourteen hundred murders in gambling-houses and other resorts of debauchery.  As early as the tenth century, the petty sovereigns established on the ruins of the empire of Charlemagne began the independent coining of money; and the various provinces were during the rest of this epoch inundated with a most embarrassing variety of gold, silver, and copper.  Even in ages of comparative darkness, literature made feeble efforts to burst through the entangled weeds of superstition, ignorance, and war.  In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, history was greatly cultivated; and Froissart, Monstrelet, Olivier de la Marche, and Philip de Comines, gave to their chronicles and memoirs a charm of style since their days almost unrivalled.  Poetry began to be followed with success in the Netherlands, in the Dutch, Flemish, and French languages; and even before the institution of the Floral Games in France, Belgium possessed its chambers of rhetoric (rederykkamers) which labored to keep alive the sacred flame of poetry with more zeal than success.  In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these societies were established in almost every burgh of Flanders and Brabant; the principal towns possessing several at once.

The arts in their several branches made considerable progress in the Netherlands during this epoch.  Architecture was greatly cultivated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; most of the cathedrals and town houses being constructed in that age.  Their vastness, solidity, and beauty of design and execution, make them still speaking monuments of the stern magnificence and finished taste of the times.  The patronage of Philip the Good, Charles the Rash, and Margaret of Austria, brought music into fashion, and led to its cultivation in a remarkable degree.  The first musicians of France were drawn from Flanders; and other professors from that country acquired great celebrity in Italy for their scientific improvements in their delightful art.

Painting, which had languished before the fifteenth century, sprung at once into a new existence from the invention of John Van Eyck, known better by the name of John of Bruges.  His accidental discovery of the art of painting in oil quickly spread over Europe, and served to perpetuate to all time the records of the genius which has bequeathed its vivid impressions to the world.  Painting on glass, polishing diamonds, the Carillon, lace, and tapestry, were among the inventions which owed their birth to the Netherlands in these ages, when the faculties of mankind sought so many new channels for mechanical development.  The discovery of a new world by Columbus and other eminent navigators gave a fresh and powerful impulse to European talent, by affording an immense reservoir for its