perum has so much in common with the Speculum in the style of its art, its costumes, and its general character, that, although of earlier date, it may be unhesitatingly ascribed to the same country.
The internal evidence, however, only enforces the probabilities springing from the social condition of the Netherlands, then the most highly civilized country north of the Alps. Its industries, in the hands of the great guilds of Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Louvain, Antwerp, and Liege, were the busiest in Europe. Its commerce was fast upon the lagging sails of Venice. The "Lancashire of the Middle Ages," as it has been fitly called, sent its manufactures abroad wherever the paths of the sea had been made open, and received the world's wealth in return. The magnificence of its Court was the wonder of foreigners, and the prosperity of its people their admiration. The confusion of mediæval life, it is true, was still there—fierce temper in the artisans, blood-thirstiness in the soldiery, everywhere the pitilessness of military force, wielded by a proud and selfish caste, as Froissart and Philippe de Comyns plainly recount; but there, nevertheless—although the brutal sack of Liege was yet to take place—modern life was beginning; merchant-life, supported by trade, citizen-life, made possible by the high organization of the great guilds, had begun, although the merchant and the citizen must still wear the sword; art, under the guidance of the Van Eycks, was passing out of mediæval conventionalism, out of the monastery and the monkish tradition, to deal no longer with lank, meagre, martyr-like bodies, to care no more for the moral lesson in contempt of artistic beauty, to come face to face with nature and humanity as they really were before men's eyes; and modern intel-
