ponderous arches, the huge
edifice, with triple tower and sculptured stones and storied windows,
that arose in the place and in the midst of the humble wooden churches
and wattled tenements of the Saxon period, might have warned the
nobles who were present that the days of their rule were numbered,
and that the _avenging, civilizing, stimulating_ hand of another and a
mightier race was at work, which would change the whole face of their
language, their manners, their Church, and their commonwealth. The
Abbey, so far exceeding the demands of the _dull and stagnant_ minds
of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, was founded not only in faith, but in
hope: in the hope that England had yet a glorious career to run; that
the line of her sovereigns would not be broken, even when the race of
Alfred had ceased to reign."

There must surely be some among my hearers who are startled, if
not offended, at being told in the terms which I emphasized in
this sentence, that the minds of our Saxon fathers were, although
fantastic, dull, and, although childish, stagnant; that farther, in
their fantastic stagnation; they were savage,--and in their innocent
dullness, criminal; so that the future character and fortune of
the race depended on the critical advent of the didactic and
disciplinarian Norman baron, at once to polish them, stimulate, and
chastise.

Before I venture to say a word in distinct arrest of this judgment,
I will give you a chart, as clear as the facts observed in the two
previous lectures allow, of the state and prospects of the Saxons,
when this violent benediction of conquest happened to them: and
especially I would rescue, in the measure that justice bids, the
memory even of their Pagan religion from the general scorn in which
I used Carlyle's description of the idol of ancient Prussia as
universally exponent of the temper of Northern devotion. That
Triglaph, or Triglyph Idol, (derivation of Triglaph wholly unknown to
me--I use Triglyph only for my own handiest epithet), last set up, on
what is now St. Mary's hill in Brandenburg, in 1023, belonged indeed
to a people wonderfully like the Saxons,--geographically their close
neighbours,--in habits of life, and aspect of native land, scarcely
distinguishable from them,--in Carlyle's words, a "strong-boned,
iracund, herdsman and fisher people, highly averse to be interfered
with, in their religion especially, and inhabiting a moory flat
country, full of lakes and woods, but with