But, apart from its historical interest, Angers is a mine of treasure to the archæologist or the artist. In the beauty and character of its site it strongly resembles Le Mans. The river Mayenne comes down from the north, from its junction with the Sarthe, edged on either side by low ranges of _coteaux_ which approaching it nearly on the west leave room along its eastern bank for vast level flats of marshy meadow land, cut through by white roads and long poplar-rows--meadows which in reality represent the old river-bed in some remote geological age before it had shrunk to its present channel. Below Angers the valley widens, and as the Mayenne coils away to Ponts de Ce it throws out on either side broad flats, rich in grass and golden flowers, and scored with rhines as straight and choked with water-weeds as the rhines of Somersetshire. It is across these lower meadows, from the base of the abbey walls of St. Nicholas, that one gets the finest view of Angers, the colossal mass of its castle, the two delicate towers of the Cathedral rising sharp against the sky, the stern belfry of St. Aubin. Angers stands in fact on a huge block of slate-rock, thrown forward from one of the higher plateaux which edge the marshy meadows, and closing up to the river in what was once a cliff as abrupt as that of Le Mans. Pleasant boulevards curve away in a huge semicircle from the river, and between these boulevards and the Mayenne lies the dark old town pierced by steep lanes and break-neck alleys. On the highest point of the block and approached by the steepest lane of all stands the Cathedral of St. Maurice, the tall slender towers of its western front and the fantastic row of statues which fill the arcade between them contrasting picturesquely enough with the bare grandeur of its interior, where the broad, low vaulting reminds us that we are on the architectural border of northern and southern Europe. St. Maurice is in the strictest sense the mother church of the town. M. Michelet has with singular lucklessness selected Angers as the type of a feudal city; with the one exception of the Castle of St. Louis it is absolutely without a trace of the feudal impress. Up to the Revolution it remained the most ecclesiastical of French towns. Christianity found the small Roman borough covering little more than the space on the height above the river afterwards occupied by the Cathedral precincts, planted its church in the midst of it, buttressed it to north and south with the great Merovingian Abbeys of St. Aubin and St. Serge, and linked them together by a chain of inferior foundations that entirely covered its eastern side. From the river on the south to the river on the north Angers lay ringed in by a belt of priories and churches and abbeys. Of the greatest of these, that of St. Aubin, only one huge tower remains, but fragments of it are still to be seen embedded in the buildings of the Prefecture--above all a