William Makepeace Thackeray

“ It is an absurd little gallery, absurdly imitating the Louvre, with just such compartments and pillars as you see in the noble Paris gallery; only here the pillars and capitals are stucco and white in place of marble and gold, and plaster-of-paris busts of great Belgians are placed between the pillars. An artist of the country has made a picture containing them, and you will be ashamed of your ignorance when you hear many of their names. ”

“ The footmen were like the rest of the fashionable world in this respect. I felt for my part that I respected them. They were in daily communication with a duke! They were not the rose, but they had lived beside it. There is an odor in the English aristocracy which intoxicates plebeians. I am sure that any commoner in England, though he would die rather than confess it, would have a respect for those great big hulking Duke's footmen.
The day before, her Grace the Duchess had passed us alone in a chariot-and-four with two outriders. What better mark of innate superiority could man want? ”

“ Here stands, too, the theatre that is to be; there is a cafe, and on evenings a military band plays the very worst music I ever remember to have heard. I went out to-night to take a quiet walk upon this place, and the horrid brazen discord of these trumpeters set me half mad.
I went to the cafe for refuge, passing on the way a subterraneous beer-shop, where men and women were drinking to the sweet music of a cracked barrel-organ. They take in a couple of French papers at this cafe, and the same number of Belgian journals. ”

“ If I were a duchess of the present day, I would say to the duke my noble husband, "My dearest grace, I think, when I travel alone in my chariot from Hammersmith to London, I will not care for the outriders. In these days, when there is so much poverty and so much disaffection in the country, we should not eclabousser the canaille with the sight of our preposterous prosperity." ”

“ A couple of old ladies in white hoods were tugging and swaying about at two bell-ropes that came down into the middle of the church, and at least five hundred others in white veils were seated all round about us in mute contemplation until the service began, looking very solemn, and white, and ghastly, like an army of tombstones by moonlight. ”

“ There was a bell ringing in the chapel hard by. "Hark!" said our guide, "that is one of the sisters dying. Will you come up and see the cells?"
The cells, it need not be said, are the snuggest little nests in the world, with serge-curtained beds and snowy linen, and saints and martyrs pinned against the wall. "We may sit up till twelve o'clock, if we like," said the nun; "but we have no fire and candle, and so what's the use of sitting up? When we have said our prayers we are glad enough to go to sleep." ”

“ We strolled into the town, but, though the night was excessively fine and it was not yet eleven o'clock, the streets of the little capital were deserted, and the handsome blazing cafes round about the theatres contained no inmates. Ah, what a pretty sight is the Parisian Boulevard on a night like this! how many pleasant hours has one passed in watching the lights, and the hum, and the stir, and the laughter of those happy, idle people! ”

“ This morning, after having seen the Park, the fashionable boulevard, the pictures, the cafes—having sipped, I say, the sweets of every flower that grows in this paradise of Brussels, quite weary of the place, we mounted on a Namur diligence, and jingled off at four miles an hour for Waterloo.
The road is very neat and agreeable: the Forest of Soignies here and there interposes pleasantly, to give your vehicle a shade; the country, as usual, is vastly fertile and well cultivated. ”

“ A painter might spend months here, and wander from church to church, and admire old towers and pinnacles, tall gables, bright canals, and pretty little patches of green garden and moss-grown wall, that reflect in the clear quiet water. Before the inn-window is a garden, from which in the early morning issues a most wonderful odor of stocks and wallflowers ”

“ ANTWERP.
As many hundreds of thousands of English visit this city (I have met at least a hundred of them in this half-hour walking the streets, "Guide-book" in hand) , and as the ubiquitous Murray has already depicted the place, there is no need to enter into a long description of it, its neatness, its beauty, and its stiff antique splendor. The tall pale houses have many of them crimped gables, that look like Queen Elizabeth's ruffs. There are as many people in the streets as in London at three o'clock in the morning ”

“ The same gloomy spirit which made a religion of them, and worked upon the people by the grossest of all means, terror, distracted the natural feelings of man to maintain its power—shut gentle women into lonely, pitiless convents—frightened poor peasants with tales of torment—taught that the end and labor of life was silence, wretchedness, and the scourge—murdered those by fagot and prison who thought otherwise. ”

“ The tall courier who has been bouncing about the deck in attendance upon these ladies (it is his first day of service, and he is eager to make a favorable impression on them and the lady's-maids too) has just brought them from the carriage a small paper of sweet cakes (nothing is prettier than to see a pretty woman eating sweet biscuits) and a bottle that evidently contains Malmsey madeira. How daintily they sip it; how happy they seem; how that lucky rogue of an Irishman prattles away! Yonder is a noble group indeed: an English gentleman and his family. ”

“ They grow gray in battle and victory, and after thirty years of bloody service, a young gentleman of fifteen, fresh from a preparatory school, who can scarcely read, and came but yesterday with a pinafore in to papa's dessert—such a young gentleman, I say, arrives in a spick-and-span red coat, and calmly takes the command over our veteran, who obeys him as if God and nature had ordained that so throughout time it should be.
That privates should obey, and that they should be smartly punished if they disobey, this one can understand very well. ”

“ The Duke d'Arenberg has a picture-gallery worthy of his princely house. It does not contain great pieces, but tit-bits of pictures, such as suit an aristocratic epicure. For such persons a great huge canvas is too much, it is like sitting down alone to a roasted ox; and they do wisely, I think, to patronize small, high-flavored, delicate morceaux, such as the Duke has here. ”

“ Outside of the moat of Antwerp, and at every village by which we passed, it was pleasant to see the happy congregations of well-clad people that basked in the evening sunshine, and soberly smoked their pipes and drank their Flemish beer. Men who love this drink must, as I fancy, have something essentially peaceful in their composition, and must be more easily satisfied than folks on our side of the water. The excitement of Flemish beer is, indeed, not great. ”

“ We ascend upon deck, and after eying each other for a brief space and with a friendly modest hesitation, we begin anon to converse about the weather and other profound and delightful themes of English discourse. We confide to each other our respective opinions of the ladies round about us. Look at that charming creature in a pink bonnet and a dress of the pattern of a Kilmarnock snuff-box: a stalwart Irish gentleman in a green coat and bushy red whiskers is whispering something very agreeable into her ear, as is the wont of gentlemen of his nation ”

“ As for the notion that foreigners hate us because we have beaten them so often, my dear sir, this is the greatest error in the world: well-educated Frenchmen DO NOT BELIEVE THAT WE HAVE BEATEN THEM. A man was once ready to call me out in Paris because I said that we had beaten the French in Spain; and here before me is a French paper, with a London correspondent discoursing about Louis Buonaparte and his jackass expedition to Boulogne. ”

“ There is a Berghem, much more unaffected than that artist's works generally are; and, what is more, precious in the eyes of many ladies as an object of art, there is, in one of the grand saloons, some needlework done by the Duke's own grandmother, which is looked at with awe by those admitted to see the palace.
The chief curiosity, if not the chief ornament of a very elegant library, filled with vases and bronzes, is a marble head, supposed to be the original head of the Laocoon. It is, unquestionably a finer head than that which at present figures upon the shoulders of the famous statue. ”

“ How is the stomach of man to be brought to desire and to receive all this quantity? Do not gastronomists complain of heaviness in London after eating a couple of mutton-chops? Do not respectable gentlemen fall asleep in their arm-chairs? Are they fit for mental labor? Far from it. But look at the difference here: after dinner here one is as light as a gossamer. One walks with pleasure, reads with pleasure, writes with pleasure—nay, there is the supper-bell going at ten o'clock, and plenty of eaters, too. ”

“ In our free country a tradesman, a lackey, or a waiter will submit to almost any given insult from a gentleman: in these benighted lands one man is as good as another; and pray God it may soon be so with us! Of all European people, which is the nation that has the most haughtiness, the strongest prejudices, the greatest reserve, the greatest dulness? I say an Englishman of the genteel classes. An honest groom jokes and hobs-and-nobs and makes his way with the kitchen-maids, for there is good social nature in the man ”

“ Here, there is one picture, a dying saint taking the communion, a large piece ten or eleven feet high, and painted in an incredibly short space of time, which is extremely curious indeed for the painter's study. The picture is scarcely more than an immense magnificent sketch; but it tells the secret of the artist's manner, which, in the midst of its dash and splendor, is curiously methodical. Where the shadows are warm the lights are cold, and vice versa ”

“ Early the next morning we walked through a number of streets in the place, and saw certain sights. The Park is very pretty, and all the buildings round about it have an air of neatness—almost of stateliness. The houses are tall, the streets spacious, and the roads extremely clean. In the Park is a little theatre, a cafe somewhat ruinous, a little palace for the king of this little kingdom, some smart public buildings (with S. P. Q. B. emblazoned on them, at which pompous inscription one cannot help laughing) , and other rows of houses somewhat resembling a little Rue de Rivoli. ”

“ Let us make his picture, and have done with him.
I could not understand, in my walks about this place, which is certainly picturesque enough, and contains extraordinary charms in the shape of old gables, quaint spires, and broad shining canals—I could not at first comprehend why, for all this, the town was especially disagreeable to me, and have only just hit on the reason why. Sweetest Juliana, you will never guess it: it is simply this, that I have not seen a single decent-looking woman in the whole place; they look all ugly, with coarse mouths, vulgar figures, mean mercantile faces ”

“ The Laureate is among the English poets evidently the great favorite of our guide: the choice does honor to his head and heart. A man must have a very strong bent for poetry, indeed, who carries Southey's works in his portmanteau, and quotes them in proper time and occasion. Of course at Waterloo a spirit like our guide's cannot fail to be deeply moved, and to turn to his favorite poet for sympathy. ”

“ The expression of woe is more manly and intense; in the group as we know it, the head of the principal figure has always seemed to me to be a grimace of grief, as are the two accompanying young gentlemen with their pretty attitudes, and their little silly, open-mouthed despondency. It has always had upon me the effect of a trick, that statue, and not of a piece of true art. It would look well in the vista of a garden ”

“ Along the quays of the lazy Scheldt are innumerable good-natured groups of beer-drinkers (small-beer is the most good-natured drink in the world) ; along the barriers outside of the town, and by the glistening canals, are more beer-shops and more beer-drinkers. The city is defended by the queerest fat military. The chief traffic is between the hotels and the railroad. The hotels give wonderful good dinners, and especially at the "Grand Laboureur" may be mentioned a peculiar tart, which is the best of all tarts that ever a man ate since he was ten years old. ”