The great Van Eyck is hung in a chapel on the south of the choir, and the services of the verger must be sought for its exhibition.  The paintings on the shutters are merely copies by Coxie, six of the originals being in the Picture Gallery in Berlin.  Their restoration to Ghent, one hopes, will form a fractional discharge of the swiftly accumulating debt that Germany owes to Belgium.  The four main panels, however, are genuine work of the early fifteenth century, the reredos as a whole having been begun by Hubert, and finished by Jan van Eyck in 1432.  The centre-piece is in illustration of the text in the Apocalypse (v. 12):  “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.”  One may question, indeed, if figurative language of the kind in question can ever be successfully transferred to canvas; whether this literal lamb, on its red-damasked table, in the midst of these carefully marshalled squadrons of Apostles, Popes, and Princes, can ever quite escape a hint of something ludicrous.  One may question all this, yet still admire to the full both the spirit of devotion that inspired this marvellous picture and its miracle of minute and jewel-like execution.  There are scores of other good pictures in Ghent, including (not even to go outside St. Bavon’s) the “Christ among the Doctors” by Francis Pourbus, into which portraits of Philip II. of Spain, the Emperor Charles V., and the infamous Duke of Alva—­names of terrible import in the sixteenth-century history of the Netherlands—­are introduced among the bystanders; whilst to the left of Philip is Pourbus himself, “with a greyish cap on which is inscribed Franciscus Pourbus, 1567.”  But it is always to the “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb” that our steps are first directed, and to which they always return.

It is hard, indeed, that necessities of space should compel us to pass so lightly over other towns in Flanders—­over Courtrai, with its noble example of a fortified bridge, and with its great picture, by Van Dyck, of the “Raising of the Cross” that was stolen mysteriously a few years ago from the church of Notre Dame, but has since, like the Joconde at the Louvre, been recovered and replaced; over Oudenarde, with its two fine churches, and its small town hall that is famous for its splendour even in a country the Hotels de Ville of which are easily the most elaborate (if not always the most chaste or really beautiful) in Europe; and over certain very minor places, such as Damme, to the north-east of Bruges, whose silent, sunny streets, and half-deserted churches, seem to breathe the very spirit of Flemish mediaevalism.  Of the short strip of Flemish coast, from near Knocke, past the fashionable modern bathing-places of Heyst, Blankenberghe, and Ostende, to a point beyond La Panne—­from border to border it measures roughly only some forty miles, and is almost absolutely straight—­I willingly say little, for it seems to me but a little thing when compared with