Count Fulc the Good, how, journeying along
Loire-side towards Tours, he saw just as the towers of St. Martin's rose
before him in the distance a leper full of sores, who put by his offer
of alms and desired to be borne to the sacred city. Amid the jibes of
his courtiers the good count lifted him in his arms and carried him
along bank and bridge. As they entered the town the leper vanished from
their sight, and men told how Fulc had borne an angel unawares. Little
of his ancestor's tenderness or poetry lingered in the practical
utilitarian mind of Henry Fitz-Empress; but the simple Hospice in the
fields by Le Mans or the grand Hospital of St. John in the suburb of
Angers displayed an enlightened care for the physical condition of his
people which is all the more striking that in him and his sons it had
probably little connection with the usual motives of religious charity
which made such works popular in the middle ages, but, like the rest of
their administrative system, was a pure anticipation of modern feeling.
There are few buildings more complete or more beautiful in their
completeness than the Hospital of St. John; the vast hall with its
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
archaeological, 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 o