n was celebrated as a seat of literature: its
university, founded in 1246, was only inferior to that of Paris; and its
Academy of Belles Lettres, founded in 1685, was the first after that of
the Nation. The chapel of the university is now a gallery for paintings.
The professors of these literary institutions have very competent
salaries: the sciences taught are Mathematics, Medicine, Natural and
Experimental Philosophy, and the Fine Arts. The best quality, however,
of these institutions is that the instructions, such as they are, are
gratuitous; the doors are open to all who choose to enter them; those
only who can afford it are expected to pay.

Angers, being so near La Vendee, suffered much by the Chouans, and still
retains many melancholy traces of the siege which it had to maintain.
The people, with feelings which are better conceived than expressed,
spoke with great reluctance on their past sufferings: there seems indeed
one great maxim at present current in France, and this is to forget the
past as if it had never happened. A foreigner is sure to offend, who
interrogates them upon any thing connected with the horrible
Revolution.

Nothing can be more delightful than the environs of Angers, whether for
those who walk or ride. The country is thickly enclosed, and on each
side of the river varied with hill and dale, with woodland and meadow.
The villages and small towns along the whole bank of the Loire are
numerous, and invariably picturesque and beautiful. In the vicinity of
Angers the vineyards are very frequent, and cover the hills, and even
the valleys, with their luxuriance; nothing can be more beautiful than
the natural festoons which are formed by their long branches as they
project over the road, and when the grapes are ripe, the landscape wants
nothing of perfect beauty. The peasantry, the Vignerons as they are
called, live in the midst of their vineyards: their habitations are
usually excavated out of the rocks and small hillocks on which they grow
their vines, and as these hillocks are usually composed of strata of
chalk, the cottages are dry and comfortable. Some of them, as seen from
the road, being covered even over their doors by the vine branches, had
the appearance of so many nests, and as many of them as had two stories,
were picturesque in the extreme. Upon the whole, the condition of the
peasantry in this part of France is very comfortable: they are
temperate, unceasingly gay, and sufficiently c