Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 March 1893 — QUEER BUT DELIGHTFUL TOWN [ARTICLE]

QUEER BUT DELIGHTFUL TOWN

Peculiarities or tlio Capital of tho Little Kingdom of Holkluiu. Brussels is a showy, geometrically built city, Buys Harper’s Weekly, with endless straight avenues, cubic perspectives, and well-ordered suburbs; a young and laughing capital vulgarized by its imitation of every other capital, and which an immoderate love of stucco has led to the Imitation of Paris in particular; a modernized town laid out by rule, scraped clean with pumice stone, deprived of all tho bric-a-brac of its antiquities, rebuilt without any of its primitive originality; a town which has sprung forth from the vitals of its ancient quarters with ready-made squares, symmetrical thoroughfares, straight streets, stucco and bastard-stucco buildings, live-storied houses, all the usual topographical peculiarities of Europcanlsm; a town which has luld aside its ancient robes, to dust its antique plaster work, pulverized its venerable relics, cleaned out its sewers, aerified its sinks, desquamated its ulcers to make itself like other towns; a town of palaces, barracks, academies, and, official buildings, In which is concentrated all the machinery of government, and which is tho very heart of tho body politic; a town which, with its sparse population, altogether insufficient to peoplo its wide thoroughfares, and with its somewhat paralyzing condition of well-being, its ostentatious luxury and wealth, calls up a vision of another La Hayc—a purring, selfsatisfied, quiet, satiated, much-on-vied place; a town which has retained its bourgeois character with all its pomp—a matter-of-fact, homelike, punctilious city; a town inhabited by men of simple manners and moderate intellectual power, combined with a weakness for trivial amusements and military pomp and show; yet, with it all, still remaining a very paradise to those who like to lead an easy, careless life.