double row of slender pillars, the exquisite chapel, trembling in the pure grace of its details on the very verge of Romanesque, the engaged shafts of the graceful cloister. The erection of these buildings probably went on through the whole reigns of our three Angevin sovereigns, but the sterner and simpler hall called the Lazar-house beside with its three aisles and noble sweep of wide arches is clearly of the date of Henry alone. It was occupied when I visited it some years ago as a brewery, but never was brewer more courteous, more genuinely archæological, than its occupant. Throughout these central provinces indeed, as throughout Normandy, the enlightened efforts of the Government have awakened a respect for and pride in their national monuments which extends even to the poorest of the population. Few buildings of a really high class are now left to ruin and desecration as they were twenty years ago; unfortunately their rescue from the destruction of time is too often followed by the more destructive attack of the restorer. And in almost every town of any provincial importance one may obtain what in England it is simply ridiculous to ask for, a really intelligent history of the place itself and a fair description of the objects of interest which it contains. The broken ruins of the Pont de Treilles, the one low tower above the river Mayenne which remains of the walls around the suburb of Roncevray, show the price which Henry and his sons set on these costly buildings. They have a special interest in Angevin history, for they were the last legacy of the Counts to their capital. Across the river, at the south-west corner of the town itself, stands the huge fortress that commemorates the close of their rule, the castle begun by the French conqueror, Philip Augustus, and completed by his descendant St. Louis. From the wide flats below Angers, where Mayenne rolls lazily on to the Loire, one looks up awed at the colossal mass which seems to dwarf even the minster beside it, at its dark curtains, its fosse trenched deep in the rock, its huge bastions chequered with iron-like bands of slate and unrelieved by art of sculptor or architect. It is as if the conquerors of the Angevins had been driven to express in this huge monument the very temper of the men from whom they reft Anjou, their grand, repulsive isolation, their dark pitiless power.