of line.”  Yes; that is true:  the Norman arch is never derived from classic forms.  The cathedral,[14] whose aisles you saw or might have seen, yesterday, interpenetrated with light, whose vaults you might have heard prolonging the sweet divisions of majestic sound, would have been built in that stately symmetry by Norman law, though never an arch at Rome had risen round her field of blood,—­though never her Sublician bridge had been petrified by her Augustan pontifices.  But the decoration, though not the structure of those arches, they owed to another race,[15] whose words they stole without understanding, though three centuries before, the Saxon understood, and used, to express the most solemn majesty of his Kinghood,—­

  “EGO, EDGAR, TOTIVS ALBIONIS”—­

not Rex, that would have meant the King of Kent or Mercia, not of England,—­no, nor Imperator; that would have meant only the profane power of Rome, but BASILEVS, meaning a King who reigned with sacred authority given by Heaven and Christ.

[Footnote 14:  Of Oxford, during the afternoon service.]

[Footnote 15:  See the concluding section of the lecture.]

With far meaner thoughts, both of themselves and their powers, the Normans set themselves to build impregnable military walls, and sublime religious ones, in the best possible practical ways; but they no more made books of their church fronts than of their bastion flanks; and cared, in the religion they accepted, neither for its sentiments nor its promises, but only for its immediate results on national order.

As I read them, they were men wholly of this world, bent on doing the most in it, and making the best of it that they could;—­men, to their death, of Deed, never pausing, changing, repenting, or anticipating, more than the completed square, [Greek:  ’aneu psogou], of their battle, their keep, and their cloister.  Soldiers before and after everything, they learned the lockings and bracings of their stones primarily in defence against the battering-ram and the projectile, and esteemed the pure circular arch for its distributed and equal strength more than for its beauty.  “I believe again,” says M. le Duc,[16] “that the feudal castle never arrived at its perfectness till after the Norman invasion, and that this race of the North was the first to apply a defensive system under unquestionable laws, soon followed by the nobles of the Continent, after they had, at their own expense, learned their superiority.”

[Footnote 16:  Article “Chateau,” vol. iii, p. 65.]

The next sentence is a curious one.  I pray your attention to it.  “The defensive system of the Norman is born of a profound sentiment of distrust and cunning, foreign to the character of the Frank.”  You will find in all my previous notices of the French, continual insistance upon their natural Franchise, and also, if you take the least pains in analysis of their literature down to this day, that the idea of falseness is to them indeed more hateful than to any other European nation.  To take a quite cardinal instance.  If you compare Lucian’s and Shakespeare’s Timon with Moliere’s Alceste, you will find the Greek and English misanthropes dwell only on men’s ingratitude to themselves, but Alceste, on their falsehood to each other.