of tomb—­temple over sarcophagus, in which the pediments rise gradually, as time goes on, into acute angles—­get pierced in the gable with foils, and their sculptures thrown outside on their flanks, and become at last in the fourteenth century, the tombs of Verona.  But what is the meaning of the Normans employing these Greek slaves for their work in Sicily (within thirty miles of the field of Himera)?  Well, the main meaning is that though the Normans could build, they couldn’t carve, and were wise enough not to try to, when they couldn’t, as you do now all over this intensely comic and tragic town:  but, here in England, they only employed the Saxon with a grudge, and therefore being more and more driven to use barren mouldings without sculpture, gradually developed the structural forms of archivolt, which breaking into the lancet, brighten and balance themselves into the symmetry of early English Gothic.

But even for the first decoration of the archivolt itself, they were probably indebted to the Greeks in a degree I never apprehended, until by pure happy chance, a friend gave me the clue to it just as I was writing the last pages of this lecture.

In the generalization of ornament attempted in the first volume of the ‘Stones of Venice,’ I supposed the Norman zigzag (and with some practical truth) to be derived from the angular notches with which the blow of an axe can most easily decorate, or at least vary, the solid edge of a square fillet.  My good friend, and supporter, and for some time back the single trustee of St. George’s Guild, Mr. George Baker, having come to Oxford on Guild business, I happened to show him the photographs of the front of Iffley church, which had been collected for this lecture; and immediately afterwards, in taking him through the schools, stopped to show him the Athena of AEgina as one of the most important of the Greek examples lately obtained for us by Professor Richmond.  The statue is (rightly) so placed that in looking up to it, the plait of hair across the forehead is seen in a steeply curved arch.  “Why,” says Mr. Baker, pointing to it, “there’s the Norman arch of Iffley.”  Sure enough, there it exactly was:  and a moment’s reflection showed me how easily, and with what instinctive fitness, the Norman builders, looking to the Greeks as their absolute masters in sculpture, and recognizing also, during the Crusades, the hieroglyphic use of the zigzag, for water, by the Egyptians, might have adopted this easily attained decoration at once as the sign of the element over which they reigned, and of the power of the Greek goddess who ruled both it and them.

I do not in the least press your acceptance of such a tradition, nor for the rest, do I care myself whence any method of ornament is derived, if only, as a stranger, you bid it reverent welcome.  But much probability is added to the conjecture by the indisputable transition of the Greek egg and arrow moulding into the floral cornices of Saxon and other twelfth century cathedrals in Central France.  These and other such transitions and exaltations I will give you the materials to study at your leisure, after illustrating in my next lecture the forces of religious imagination by which all that was most beautiful in them was inspired.