What had been the precise nature of Richard’s training for his appointed work--what proportion of his seventeen years’ life had been actually spent in Aquitaine, what opportunities he had had of growing familiar with the people over whom he was now set to rule--we have no means of determining. By his own natural temper, however, he was probably of all Eleanor’s sons the one least fitted to gain the goodwill of the south. The “Cœur-de-lion” of tradition, indeed--the adventurous crusader, the mirror of knightly prowess and knightly courtesy, the lavish patron of verse and song, the ideal king of troubadours and knights-errant--looks at first glance like the very incarnation of the spirit of the south. But it was only in the intellectual part of his nature that his southern blood made itself felt; the real groundwork of his character was made of sterner stuff. The love of splendour and elegance, the delight in poetry and music,[969] the lavish generosity, the passion for adventure, which contrasted so vividly with his father’s practical businesslike temper, came to him without doubt from his mother. The moral deficiencies and evil tendencies of his nature he himself charged, somewhat too exclusively, upon the demon-blood of the Angevin counts.[970] But we need not look either to an ancestress so shadowy and so remote as the demon-countess, nor to a land so far distant from us as Poitou, for the source of Richard’s strongest characteristics both of body and of mind. In him alone among Henry’s sons can we see a likeness to the Norman forefathers of the Empress Matilda. His outward aspect, his lofty stature, his gigantic strength--held in check though it was by the constantly-recurring ague which “kept him, fearless, in a tremor as continual as the tremor of fear in which he kept the rest of the world”[971]--his blue eyes and golden hair, all proclaimed him a child of the north. And although he spent the chief part of his life elsewhere, the slender share of local and national sympathies which he possessed seems to have lain in the same direction. The “lion-heart” chose its own last earthly resting-place at Rouen, not at Poitiers;[972] and the intimate friend and comrade whose name is inseparably associated with his by a tradition which, whatever its historical value, is as famous as it is beautiful, was no Poitevin or Provençal troubadour, but a trouvère from northern France.[973] The influence of his northman-blood shewed itself more vividly still when on his voyage to Palestine, having lived to be more than thirty years old without possessing a skiff that he could call his own, or--unless indeed in early childhood he had gone a cruise round his father’s island-realm--ever making a longer or more adventurous voyage than that from Southampton to Barfleur or Wissant, he suddenly developed not only a passionate love of the sea, but a consummate seamanship which he certainly had had no opportunity of acquiring in