His name strikes the vein of thought which was uppermost in my mind at Bordeaux. I found it impossible to forget that it had been for three centuries a half English city, and the capital of a half English province, ruled by an English king; or that up the wide Gironde, between the marly banks, Edward the Black Prince must many a time have sailed in state. Sir John Chandos and Sir Walter Manny, and many another English worthy, knew these streets as well as they knew Eastcheap or Aldgate. John of Gaunt and Talbot of Shrewsbury dwelt here, as much at home and at their ease as in York or Leicester. It is impossible not to wonder at those old Englishmen; not to think of them with pride, as we remember how firmly, the roving blood of Dane and Norman young in their veins, they grasped this prize; how long they clung to it, how boldly they flaunted the French lilies in the eyes of France; how cheerfully they crowded year by year to cross the bay in open boats! And then what cosmopolitans they were, with their manors in Devon and Aquitane, their houses in London and Bordeaux; with perhaps a snug little box at Calais, and a farm or two in Maine. How trippingly French and Provençal, and the rougher English, passed over their tongues. They founded no empire--on the contrary they lost one. But they were the immediate ancestors of Elizabeth's sea-dogs, for all that. In holding Guienne through those three centuries their strength was wasted. When they lost it (1451), they turned upon one another, and the Wars of the Roses took up half a century. After that they needed half-a-century's holiday to recruit themselves; and then out flashed the Vikings' spirit again--this time to better purpose--and under Drake and Grenville and Hawkins, they, the men of Poitiers and Sluys, made the greater England. Even in Bordeaux they have left some traces of their work. They built this cathedral which stands here, in the third city of France. Their leopards are not yet effaced from the walls of yonder castle. Their dogs--_les dogues des Anglais_, our waiter dubbed them, on seeing us fondle them--play about the streets, and sniff with a special friendliness at English calves. Indeed, I never saw such a place for bull-dogs--chiefly brindled ones--as Bordeaux. We drank a toast after dinner the evening before we left. It was, _Les dogues des Anglais!_