are two lions tearing apart a wild boar; and in the jambs are virtues, armed with shield and sword, trampling upon demon vices--men struggling with wild beasts--and adoring angels swinging censers. This is partly coloured, and the sculpture is very fine, great attention being given to detail. [Illustration: ANGERS] Freeman declares the city of Angers to be the headquarters of the Angevin style of architecture, and quotes as a noticeable example of that style the Cathedral of St. Maurice, which differs at least as widely from that of the French churches as from that of Normandy. The object of the Angevin architect was breadth, and he has sacrificed both length and height to the attainment of his end. The view from the west doorway of St. Maurice shows a well-known example of what is termed the “hall plan”--a single wide nave, having choir and transepts, but without ambulatories or aisles. That the church originally had aisles, however, is evident from a plan of Saint Maurice given in Mr. Lethaby’s “Mediæval Art”; they were removed, it is assumed, in order to simplify the construction of the vault. The great relieving arches of the nave as it now stands are divided into three bays only. “In everything,” Freeman says, “the tendency is to have a few large members rather than many small ones. There is a certain boldness and simplicity about this kind of treatment; but there is also a certain bareness, and an Angevin church looks both lower and shorter than it really is.” The vaulting of the roof here follows the same sub-domical design as that of Notre Dame de la Coûture at Le Mans. The stained glass is perhaps the best feature of the church as far as actual beauty goes; some of it dates from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and both in nave and choir it is very fine, particularly in the windows of the apse and in the rose window of the north transept. The tapestry which hangs in the nave and transepts represents scenes from the Apocalypse, and is very fine Arras work of the fourteenth century. Chapter Ten TOURS AND BLOIS So much has been said and written of the Loire country during the past fifty years that the modern writer has very little ground left to him, unless it be to avoid calling it the “Garden of France.” Yet over-written as it may be, Touraine has not lost any of the charm and romance which must always attach to a wide sunny land, watered by a great river, and “peopled”--one might almost say--by châteaux, every one of which has set its mark upon French history. Certainly there is something very delightful, because so unlike anything else in France, in the endless vista of grey-green levels--here and there a group of slim shivering poplars or a flash of sunlight upon the wide waters of the Loire, which winds in and out of the flats like a great lazy shining serpent--flying sometimes into a sudden rage and flooding the land, or subsiding sulkily amongst high banks and stretches of dry sand.