Rouen never was Normandy in the sense in which Le Mans
certainly was Maine; and the strong feeling of municipal life which, as
the history of the _commune_ shows, must have always gone on at Le Mans,
may have tended to make a greater concentration of the being of the
whole district in the capital than was found in other districts of the
same kind. Add to this, that, though the land of Maine contained but a
single diocese, yet that diocese was of much larger and greater extent
than any of the seven dioceses of Normandy. This is shown by the fact
that, while in the modern ecclesiastical arrangements of France, two of
the Norman dioceses have been united with others, the one Cenomannian
diocese has been divided into two.

In another point also Maine shows itself very distinctly as a Northern
district. This is in its architecture. As Anjou is the architectural
borderland between Northern and Southern Gaul, so Maine is again the
architectural borderland between Normandy and Anjou. But it shows its
character as a borderland, not by possessing an intermediate style, as
the Angevin style is distinctly intermediate between the styles of
Normandy and of Aquitaine, but rather by using the Norman and Angevin
styles side by side. In the nave of St. Julian's itself, an Angevin
clerestory and vault is set upon an arcade and triforium which may be
called Norman. At _La Couture_ the nave has wholly given way to an
Angevin rebuilding, while the choir remains Norman, with a touch of
earlier days about it. In the third great church of Le Mans, that of _Le
Pre_, the Angevin influence does not come in at all. In the department
of military architecture, Sir Francis Palgrave says that the familiar
Norman square keep was borrowed from Maine; but he brings no evidence in
support of this theory, nor have we been able to find any. It seems far
more likely that the fashion was originally Norman, and that it then
spread into the borderland, and it is certain that some of the most
historically famous castles in the land of Maine were the work of Norman
invaders.

Maine is, in one point, one of the parts of France in which an
Englishman is most inclined to feel himself at home. It shares, though
perhaps in not so marked a degree, the same English look which runs
through a large part of Normandy and Brittany. It has hedges and green
pastures, a sight pleasing to the eye after the dreary look of so many
districts of France. The land is also fairly woo