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The priests of the country are a remarkably well-fed and respectable race, without that scowling, hang-dog look which one has remarked among reverend gentlemen in the neighboring country of France. Their reverences wear buckles to their shoes, light-blue neck-cloths, and huge three-cornered hats in good condition. To-day, strolling by the cathedral, I heard the tinkling of a bell in the street, and beheld certain persons, male and female, suddenly plump down on their knees before a little procession that was passing. Two men in black held a tawdry red canopy, a priest walked beneath it holding the sacrament covered with a cloth, and before him marched a couple of little altar-boys in short white surplices, such as you see in Rubens, and holding lacquered lamps. A small train of street-boys followed the procession, cap in hand, and the clergyman finally entered a hospital for old women, near the church, the canopy and the lamp-bearers remaining without.

It was a touching scene, and as I stayed to watch it, I could not but think of the poor old soul who was dying within, listening to the last words of prayer, led by the hand of the priest to the brink of the black fathomless grave. How bright the sun was shining without all the time, and how happy and careless every thing around us looked!

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.

Among them may be mentioned, with special praise, a magnificent small Rembrandt, a Paul Potter of exceeding minuteness and beauty, an Ostade, which reminds one of Wilkie’s early performances, and a Dusart quite as good as Ostade. 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. 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; it is not august enough for a temple, with all its jerks and twirls, and polite convulsions. But who knows what susceptibilities such a confession may offend? Let us say no more about the Laocoon, nor its head, nor its tail. The Duke was offered its weight in gold, they say, for this head, and refused. It would be a shame to speak ill of such a treasure, but I have my opinion of the man who made the offer.

In the matter of sculpture almost all the Brussels churches are decorated with the most laborious wooden pulpits, which may be worth their weight in gold, too, for what I know, including his reverence preaching inside. At St. Gudule the preacher mounts into no less a place than the garden of Eden, being supported by Adam and Eve, by Sin and Death, and numberless other animals; he walks up to his desk by a rustic railing of flowers, fruits, and vegetables, with wooden peacocks, paroquets, monkeys biting apples, and many more of the birds and beasts of the field. In another church the clergyman speaks from out a hermitage; in a third from a carved palm-tree, which supports a set of oak clouds that form the canopy of the pulpit, and are, indeed, not much heavier in appearance than so many huge sponges. A priest, however tall or stout, must be lost in the midst of all these queer gimcracks; in order to be consistent, they ought to dress him up, too, in some odd fantastical suit. I can fancy the Cure of Meudon preaching out of such a place, or the Rev. Sydney Smith, or that famous clergyman of the time of the League, who brought all Paris to laugh and listen to him.