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made their way through France, and down into Spain, meeting there the highly civilized and cultivated Moors, to whom they probably owed many of their improvements in agriculture and the arts. Sailing up the Rhine, they kept up close relations with the Germans, who, under the influence of Italy, were rapidly stepping to the front rank among civilized peoples.* With Italy itself, which divided with them the commerce of the world, their relations grew more and more intimate, for they were far enough apart to assist rather than to injure each other's trade, and hence their rivalry was deprived of bitterness.

What a scene as compared with the rest of Northern Europe, and especially with England, in which we have the greatest interest, must have been presented by the Low Countries during the fourteenth century! In 1370, there are thirty-two hundred woollen-factories at Malines and on its territory. One of its merchants carries on an immense trade with Damascus and Alexandria. Another, of Valenciennes, being at Paris during a fair, buys up all the provisions exposed for sale in order to display his wealth. Ghent, in 1340, contains forty thousand weavers. In 1389, it has one hundred and eighty-nine thousand men bearing arms; the drapers alone furnish eighteen thousand in a revolt. In 1380, the goldsmiths of Bruges are numerous enough to form in war time an entire division of the army. At a repast given by one

* See Janssen's "History of Germany," for an account of its condition before the Reformation. Also Lübke's "Hist. of Art," Am. ed. ii. 1, and Giordano Bruno as to its condition about 1590, before the Thirty Years' War sent it back to semi-barbarism.

+ Little domestic concerns unlike our modern factories. Taine's "Art in the Netherlands," p. 86.

of the Counts of Flanders to the Flemish magistrates, the seats provided for the guests being unfurnished with cushions, they quietly folded up their sumptuous cloaks, richly embroidered and trimmed with fur, and placed them on the wooden benches. When leaving the table at the conclusion of the feast, a courtier called their attention to the fact that they were going without their cloaks. The burgomaster of Bruges replied: "We Flemings are not in the habit of carrying away the cushions after dinner." The queen of Philip the Fair, of France, on a visit to Bruges, exclaimed with astonishment, not unmixed with envy: "I thought myself the only queen here; but I see six hundred others, who appear more so than I.” * Commines, the French chronicler, writing in the fifteenth century, says that the traveller, leaving France and crossing the frontiers of Flanders, compared himself to the Israelites when they had quitted the desert and entered the borders of the Promised Land.

Philip the Good kept up a court which surpassed every other in Europe for luxury and magnificence.† In 1444, he gave at Lille a grand pageant, the "Feast of the Pheasant," such as the modern world had never seen before. His son, Charles the Bold, married the sister of the King of England, and gave in her honor a pageant

*Grattan's "History of the Netherlands," p. 75, Carey & Lea, Phil., 1831.

"His library consisted of the rarest manuscripts and the earliest specimens of printed books, splendidly bound and illuminated, the nucleus of a collection which, enriched by successive additions, is now one of the most important of the world." His collection of gems and plate was said to be the finest in existence. Kirk's "Charles the Bold," i. 88.

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extending over many days, even more magnificent. The English visitors wrote home that it realized the fairy tales of King Arthur and his Round Table.* As Kirk well says, in his "Life of Charles the Bold," "the luxuries of life come before the comforts," a truth to be remembered when we come to view the Elizabethan age in England. Reading of her two or three thousand gowns, the revels which attended her royal progresses, the costly garments of the courtiers, the tapestry, the gold and silver plate to be found in some few mansions, we should make a great mistake if we regarded these exhibitions as proofs of an advanced civilization or of national comfort. In all such matters of luxury and display, England of the sixteenth or seventeenth century had nothing to compare with the Netherlands a hundred or even two hundred years before. After luxury, come comfort, intelligence, morality, and learning, which develop under very different conditions.

In the course of time even Italy was outstripped in the commercial race. The conquest of Egypt by the Turks, and the discovery of a water passage to the Indies, broke up the overland trade with the East, and destroyed the Italian and German cities which had flourished on it. Of the profits derived from the substituted ocean traffic with the Indies, and the new commerce with America-the commerce which helped so largely to give Spain her transitory wealth and greatness-the Low Countries, acting as distributors, obtained more than their full share. Passing from the dominion of the House of Burgundy to that of the House of Austria,

* See as to feasts and pageants, one witnessed by Albert Dürer in 1520, described in Taine's "Art in the Netherlands."

† 1512, 1515, and 1520.

which also numbered Spain among its vast possessions, proved to them in the end an event fraught with momentous evil. Still for a time, and from a mere material point of view, it was an evil not unmixed with good. The Netherlanders were better sailors and keener merchants than the Spaniards, and, being under the same rulers, gained substantial advantages from the close connection. The new commerce of Portugal also filled their coffers; so that while Italy and Germany were impoverished, they became wealthier and more prosperous than ever, having, by the middle of the sixteenth century, absorbed most of the carrying trade of the world.

As I have already pointed out, the English, down to the time of Elizabeth and until educated by their neighbors, knew very little even of agriculture except in its rudest forms. They were mainly engaged in raising sheep, and their wool, with that from Spain and Scotland, went to the great market of the Netherlands.* The wool-sack of the Lord Chancellor of England, says a modern writer, symbolizes the period in which sheepraising was the only industry of the people. When Philip the Good founded at Bruges his new order of chivalry, he chose as an emblem a golden fleece. The artisans of the Netherlands had woven the wool into gold.+

With wealth pouring in from all quarters, art naturally followed in the wake of commerce. Architecture was first developed, and nowhere was its cultivation

* Green's "History of the English People,” vol. i. book iii. chap. iv. + Conway's "Early Flemish Artists," p. 57. About 1380, the English, taught by Netherland emigrants, first began to make coarse woollen cloth. Southerden Burn's "Protestant Refugees in England," p. 4.

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more general than in the Netherlands. Our knowledge of the Middle Ages is still so imperfect that little can be said with certainty about the men who designed and the workmen who constructed the superb cathedrals, which, scattered over Northwestern Europe, protest against our supercilious estimate of modern progress, standing, like the ruins on the Nile, mute but unimpeachable witnesses to a former civilization. It is believed that these structures owe their origin to a great secret masonic brotherhood, league, or guild, bound probably by religious vows, with headquarters in France and Germany, and branches in other parts of Europe. To a branch of this league are attributed the splendid and elaborately finished buildings with which the Netherlands were adorned between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.* Chief among these buildings were the cathedrals of Flanders and Brabant, some of which were brilliant masterpieces.

But the Church did not here, as in most other lands, absorb all the skill and genius of the builders, and in this fact we see at once how this people stand apart from their contemporaries in Northern Europe. Elsewhere, in the North at least, architectural art was only a handmaid of religion, all decoration, under the guidance of the priesthood, being lavished on ecclesiastical structures, because the Church held almost all the knowl edge and controlled a large share of the wealth. Here, however, another power was coming to the front. The merchants and manufacturers were generous enough

* Motley's "Dutch Republic," i. 86, 551; "The Arts in the Middle Ages," La Croix, p. 377, etc. The first architecture from Germany was probably Romanesque. The true Gothic came from the Normans in France.