But, so far as you have indeed the right to trust in the courage of your own hearts, remember also—­it is not in Norman nor Saxon, but in Celtic race that your real strength lies.  The battles both of Waterloo and Alma were won by Irish and Scots—­by the terrible Scots Greys, and by Sir Colin’s Highlanders.  Your ‘thin red line,’ was kept steady at Alma only by Colonel Yea’s swearing at them.

But the old Pope, alone against a Norman army, wanted nobody to swear at him.  Steady enough he, having somebody to bless him, instead of swear at him.  St. Benedict, namely; whose (memory shall we say?) helped him now at his pinch in a singular manner,—­for the Normans, having got the old man’s forgiveness, vowed themselves his feudal servants; and for seven centuries afterwards the whole kingdom of Naples remained a fief of St. Peter,—­won for him thus by a single man, unarmed, against three thousand Norman knights, captained by Robert Guiscard!

A day of deeds, gentlemen, to some purpose,—­that 18th of June, anyhow.

Here, in the historical account of Norman character, I must unwillingly stop for to-day—­because, as you choose to spend your University money in building ball-rooms instead of lecture-rooms, I dare not keep you much longer in this black hole, with its nineteenth century ventilation.  I try your patience—­and tax your breath—­only for a few minutes more in drawing the necessary corollaries respecting Norman art.[21]

[Footnote 21:  Given at much greater length in the lecture, with diagrams from Iffley and Poictiers, without which the text of them would be unintelligible.  The sum of what I said was a strong assertion of the incapacity of the Normans for any but the rudest and most grotesque sculpture,—­Poictiers being, on the contrary, examined and praised as Gallic-French—­not Norman.]

How far the existing British nation owes its military prowess to the blood of Normandy and Anjou, I have never examined its genealogy enough to tell you;—­but this I can tell you positively, that whatever constitutional order or personal valour the Normans enforced or taught among the nations they conquered, they did not at first attempt with their own hands to rival them in any of their finer arts, but used both Greek and Saxon sculptors, either as slaves, or hired workmen, and more or less therefore chilled and degraded the hearts of the men thus set to servile, or at best, hireling, labour.

In 1874, I went to see Etna, Scylla, Charybdis, and the tombs of the Norman Kings at Palermo; surprised, as you may imagine, to find that there wasn’t a stroke nor a notion of Norman work in them.  They are, every atom, done by Greeks, and are as pure Greek as the temple of AEgina; but more rich and refined.  I drew with accurate care, and with measured profile of every moulding, the tomb built for Roger II. (afterwards Frederick II. was laid in its dark porphyry).  And it is a perfect type of the Greek-Christian form