All the mental and bodily gifts wherewith nature had endowed the most favoured members of the Angevin house seemed to have been showered upon the eldest son of Fulk V. and Aremburg of Maine. The surname by which he is most generally known, and which an inveterate usage has attached to his descendants as well as to himself, is in its origin and meaning curiously unlike most historical surnames; it seems to have been derived simply from his boyish habit of adorning his cap with a sprig of “planta-genista,” the broom which in early summer makes the open country of Anjou and Maine a blaze of living gold. With a fair and ruddy countenance, lit up by the lightning-glance of a pair of brilliant eyes; a tall, slender, sinewy frame, made for grace no less than for strength and activity:--[628] in the unanimous opinion of his contemporaries, he was emphatically “Geoffrey the Handsome.” To this prepossessing appearance were added the charms of a gracious manner and a ready, pleasant speech;[629] and beneath this winning exterior there lay a considerable share of the quick wits of his race, sharpened and developed by such a careful education as was given to very few princes of the time. The intellectual soil was worthy of the pains bestowed upon it, and brought forth a harvest of, perhaps, somewhat too precocious scholarship and sagacity. Geoffrey’s fondness for the study of the past seems to have been an inheritance from Fulk Rechin; the historian-count might have been proud of a grandson who carried in his memory all the battles fought, all the great deeds done, not only by his own people but also in foreign lands.[630] Even Fulk the Good might have approved a descendant who when still a mere boy could shine in serious conversation with such a “lettered king” as Henry I.;[631] and Fulk the Black might not have been ashamed of one who in early youth felt the “demon-blood” within him too hot to rest content in luxury and idleness, avoided the corrupting influences of mere revelry, gave himself up to the active exercises of military life,[632] and, while so devoted to letters that he would not even go to war without a learned teacher by his side,[633] turned his book-learning to account in ways at which ruder warriors and more unworldly scholars were evidently somewhat astonished.[634] Like his ancestor the Black Count, Geoffrey was one of those men about whom their intimate associates have a fund of anecdotes to tell. The “History” of his life put together from their information, a few years after his death, is chiefly made up of these stories; and through the mass of trite moralizing and pedantic verbiage in which the compiler has imbedded them there still peeps out unmistakeably the peculiar temper of his hero. Geoffrey’s readiness to forgive those who threw themselves upon his mercy is a favourite theme of his biographer’s praise; but the instances given of this clemency indicate more of the vanity and display of chivalry in its narrower