broadly true; yet the correction it needs is a very
important one. England,--under her first Alfred of Northumberland,
and under Ina of Wessex, is indeed during these centuries the most
learned, thoughtful, and progressive of European states. But she is
not a missionary power. The missionaries are always to her, not from
her:--for the very reason that she is learning so eagerly, she does
not take to preaching. Ina founds his Saxon school at Rome not to
teach Rome, nor convert the Pope, but to drink at the source of
knowledge, and to receive laws from direct and unquestioned authority.
The missionary power was wholly Scotch and Irish, and that power was
wholly one of zeal and faith, not of learning. I will ask you, in the
course of my next lecture, to regard it attentively; to-day, I must
rapidly draw to the conclusions I would leave with you.

It is more and more wonderful to me as I think of it, that no effect
whatever was produced on the Saxon, nor on any other healthy race
of the North, either by the luxury of Rome, or by her art, whether
constructive or imitative. The Saxon builds no aqueducts--designs
no roads, rounds no theatres in imitation of her,--envies none of
her vile pleasures,--admires, so far as I can judge, none of her
far-carried realistic art. I suppose that it needs intelligence of
a more advanced kind to see the qualities of complete sculpture: and
that we may think of the Northern intellect as still like that of a
child, who cares to picture its own thoughts in its own way, but does
not care for the thoughts of older people, or attempt to copy what it
feels too difficult. This much at least is certain, that for one cause
or another, everything that now at Paris or London our painters most
care for and try to realize, of ancient Rome, was utterly innocuous
and unattractive to the Saxon: while his mind was frankly open to
the direct teaching of Greece and to the methods of bright decoration
employed in the Byzantine Empire: for these alone seemed to his
fancy suggestive of the glories of the brighter world promised by
Christianity. Jewellery, vessels of gold and silver, beautifully
written books, and music, are the gifts of St. Gregory alike to the
Saxon and Lombard; all these beautiful things being used, not for the
pleasure of the present life, but as the symbols of another; while
the drawings in Saxon manuscripts, in which, better than in any other
remains of their life, we can read the people's c