BltUSSELS. '305 



passed our expectations. Many a piece of Teniers and 

 Ostade did we hastily pass ; — and connoisseurs may excuse 

 this ; for we would probably have tired them out in their 

 turn, had they been of our party, when opportunities offer- 

 ed for contemplating fruit-trees or crops of pot-herbs. It 

 was easy to distinguish four large works of Rubens, which 

 had lately been restored from the Louvre. Several young 

 Flemish artists were how busy copying particular heads 

 and figures from these. Painting, it may be remarked, 

 meets at this time with great encouragement in Brussels. 

 Mr Paelinck has acquired celebrity for historical pieces, 

 and for full length portraits. The taste for altar-pieces 

 for the churches creates, in Flanders, a demand, unknown 

 to Scotland, for essays in the highest department of the art, 

 M. De Roy is regarded as excelling most other modern 

 painters in the delineation of animals. So numerous was 

 the English company in the room, that it reminded us of 

 the Exhibition at Somerset House, or rather of the more 

 select morning assemblage to view the pictures in the Cleve- 

 land Gallery. 



The Museum, so far as we had an opportunity of obser- 

 ving, is not very remarkable for excellence in any particular 

 department. The minerals are disposed in a series of small 

 glazed cases, each case having four sloping shelves, very 

 well calculated to display the substances^ and their name, 

 which is always attached. The specimens are small, and 

 only for a show-case. Of some of the minerals, we under- 

 stood, there are larger and better examples in drawers be- 

 low. We saw many petrifactions, or vegetable impres- 

 sions, in pieces of the slate-clay which covers the coal in 

 this country : they greatly resemble those found in Scot- 

 land, — flattened reeds, galiums, small ferns, and the stem 

 of some arborescent fern or of some extinct species of fir- 



IT 



