ced 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
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 w