Romanesque arcade, fretted with tangled imagery and apocalyptic figures of the richest work of the eleventh century. The Abbey of St. Serge still stands to the north of Angers; its vast gardens and fishponds turned into the public gardens of the town, its church spacious and beautiful with a noble choir that may perhaps recall the munificence of Geoffry Martel. Of the rivals of these two great houses two only remain. Portions of the Carolingian Church of St. Martin, built by the wife of Emperor Louis le Debonnaire, are now in use as a tobacco warehouse; the pretty ruin of Toussaint, not at all unlike our own Tintern, stands well cared for in the gardens of the Museum. But, interesting as these relics are, it is not ecclesiastical Angers that the English traveller instinctively looks for; it is the Angers of the Counts, the birthplace of the Plantagenets. It is only in their own capital indeed that we fully understand our Angevin Kings, that we fully realize that they were Angevins. To an English schoolboy Henry II. is little more than the murderer of Beket and the friend of Fair Rosamund. Even an English student finds it hard after all the labours of Professor Stubbs to lay hold of either Henry or his sons. In spite of their versatile ability and of the mark which they have left on our judicature, our municipal liberty, our political constitution, the first three Plantagenets are to most of us little more than dim shapes of strange manner and speech, hurrying to their island realm to extort money, to enforce good government, and then hurrying back to Anjou. But there is hardly a boy in the streets of Angers to whom the name of Henry Fitz-Empress is strange, who could not point to the ruins of his bridge or the halls of his Hospice, or tell of the great "Levee" by which the most beneficent of Angevin Counts saved the farmers' fields from the floods of the Loire. Strangers in England, the three first Plantagenets are at home in the sunny fields along the Mayenne. The history of Anjou, the character of the Counts, their forefathers, are the keys to the subtle policy, to the strangely-mingled temper of Henry and his sons. The countless robber-holds of the Angevin noblesse must have done much towards the steady resolve with which they bridled feudalism in their island realm. The crowd of ecclesiastical foundations that ringed in their Angevin capital hardly failed to embitter, if not to suggest, their jealousy of the Church.