And here I must advise you that in all points of history relating to the period between 800 and 1200, you will find M. Viollet le Duc, incidentally throughout his ‘Dictionary of Architecture,’ the best-informed, most intelligent, and most thoughtful of guides.  His knowledge of architecture, carried down into the most minutely practical details,—­(which are often the most significant), and embracing, over the entire surface of France, the buildings even of the most secluded villages; his artistic enthusiasm, balanced by the acutest sagacity, and his patriotism, by the frankest candour, render his analysis of history during that active and constructive period the most valuable known to me, and certainly, in its field, exhaustive.  Of the later nationality his account is imperfect, owing to his professional interest in the mere science of architecture, and comparative insensibility to the power of sculpture;—­but of the time with which we are now concerned, whatever he tells you must be regarded with grateful attention.

I introduce, therefore, the Normans to you, on their first entering France, under his descriptive terms of them.[12]

[Footnote 12:  Article “Architecture,” vol. i., p. 138.]

“As soon as they were established on the soil, these barbarians became the most hardy and active builders.  Within the space of a century and a half, they had covered the country on which they had definitely landed, with religious, monastic, and civil edifices, of an extent and richness then little common.  It is difficult to suppose that they had brought from Norway the elements of art,[13] but they were possessed by a persisting and penetrating spirit; their brutal force did not want for grandeur.  Conquerors, they raised castles to assure their domination; they soon recognized the Moral force of the clergy, and endowed it richly.  Eager always to attain their end, when once they saw it, they never left one of their enterprises unfinished, and in that they differed completely from the Southern inhabitants of Gaul.  Tenacious extremely, they were perhaps the only ones among the barbarians established in France who had ideas of order; the only ones who knew how to preserve their conquests, and compose a state.  They found the remains of the Carthaginian arts on the territory where they planted themselves, they mingled with those their national genius, positive, grand, and yet supple.”

[Footnote 13:  They had brought some, of a variously Charybdic, Serpentine, and Diabolic character.—­J.R.]

Supple, ’Delie,’—­capable of change and play of the mental muscle, in the way that savages are not.  I do not, myself, grant this suppleness to the Norman, the less because another sentence of M. le Duc’s, occurring incidentally in his account of the archivolt, is of extreme counter-significance, and wide application.  “The Norman arch,” he says, “is never derived from traditional classic forms, but only from mathematical arrangement