Then Christianity conquered the Empire.  It adapted, not merely its architecture, but its very buildings, to its worship.  The Roman Basilica became the Christian church; a noble form of building enough, though one in which was neither darkness, solitude, nor silence, but crowded congregations, clapping—­or otherwise—­the popular preacher; or fighting about the election of a bishop or a pope, till the holy place ran with Christian blood.  The deep-hearted Northern turned away, in weariness and disgust, from those vast halls, fitted only for the feverish superstition of a profligate and worn-out civilisation; and took himself, amid his own rocks and forests, moors and shores, to a simpler and sterner architecture, which should express a creed, sterner; and at heart far simpler; though dogmatically the same.

And this is, to my mind, the difference, and the noble difference, between the so-called Norman architecture, which came hither about the time of the Conquest; and that of Romanized Italy.

But the Normans were a conquering race; and one which conquered, be it always remembered, in England at least, in the name and by the authority of Rome.  Their ecclesiastics, like the ecclesiastics on the Continent, were the representatives of Roman civilisation, of Rome’s right, intellectual and spiritual, to rule the world.

Therefore their architecture, like their creed, was Roman.  They took the massive towering Roman forms, which expressed domination; and piled them one on the other, to express the domination of Christian Rome over the souls, as they had represented the domination of heathen Rome over the bodies, of men.  And so side by side with the towers of the Norman keep rose the towers of the Norman cathedral—­the two signs of a double servitude.

But, with the thirteenth century, there dawned an age in Northern Europe, which I may boldly call an heroic age; heroic in its virtues and in its crimes; an age of rich passionate youth, or rather of early manhood; full of aspirations, of chivalry, of self-sacrifice as strange and terrible as it was beautiful and noble, even when most misguided.  The Teutonic nations of Europe—­our own forefathers most of all—­having absorbed all that heathen Rome could teach them, at least for the time being, began to think for themselves; to have poets, philosophers, historians, architects, of their own.  The thirteenth century was especially an age of aspiration; and its architects expressed, in buildings quite unlike those of the preceding centuries, the aspirations of the time.

The Pointed Arch had been introduced half a century before.  It may be that the Crusaders saw it in the East and brought it home.  It may be that it originated from the quadripartite vaulting of the Normans, the segmental groins of which, crossing diagonally, produced to appearance the pointed arch.  It may be that it was derived from that mystical figure of a pointed oval form, the vesica piscis.  It