There the Angevin Counts are as vivid, as real, as the Angevin Kings are on English soil unreal and dim. Hardly a building in his realm preserves the memory of Henry II.; Richard is a mere visitor to English shores; Beaulieu alone and the graven tomb at Worcester enable us to realize John. But along the Loire these Angevin rulers meet us in river-bank and castle and bridge and town. Their names are familiar words still through the length and breadth of the land. At Angers men show you the vast hospital of Henry II., while the suburb around it is the creation of his son. And not only do the men come vividly before us, but they come before us in another and a fresher light. To us they are strangers and foreigners, stern administrators, exactors of treasure, tyrants to whose tyranny, sometimes just and sometimes unjust, England was destined to owe her freedom. But for Anjou the period of their rule was the period of a peace and fame and splendour that never came back save in the shadowy resurrection under King René. Her soil is covered with monuments of their munificence, of their genuine care for the land of their race. Nine-tenths of her great churches, in the stern grandeur of their vaulting, their massive pillars, their capitals breaking into the exquisite foliage of the close of the century, witness to the pious liberality of sovereigns who in England were the oppressors of the Church, and who when doomed to endow a religious house in their realm did it by turning its inhabitants out of an already existing one and giving it simply a new name. As one walks along the famous Levee, the gigantic embankment along the Loire by which Henry saved the valley from inundation, or as one looks at his hospitals at Angers or Le Mans, it is hard not to feel a sympathy and admiration for the man from whom one shrinks coldly under the Martyrdom at Canterbury. There is a French side to the character of these Kings which, though English historians have disregarded it, is worth regarding if only because it really gave the tone to their whole life and rule. But it is a side which can only be understood when we study these Angevins in Anjou.