d the remains of the Carthaginian arts on the territory where they
planted themselves, they mingled with those their national genius,
positive, grand, and yet supple."

[Footnote 13: They _had_ brought some, of a variously Charybdic,
Serpentine, and Diabolic character.--J.R.]

Supple, 'Delie,'--capable of change and play of the mental muscle, in
the way that savages are not. I do not, myself, grant this suppleness
to the Norman, the less because another sentence of M. le Duc's,
occurring incidentally in his account of the archivolt, is of extreme
counter-significance, and wide application. "The Norman arch," he
says, "is _never derived from traditional classic forms_, but only
from mathematical arrangement of line." Yes; that is true: the
Norman arch is never derived from classic forms. The cathedral,[14]
whose aisles you saw or might have seen, yesterday, interpenetrated
with light, whose vaults you might have heard prolonging the sweet
divisions of majestic sound, would have been built in that stately
symmetry by Norman law, though never an arch at Rome had risen round
her field of blood,--though never her Sublician bridge had been
petrified by her Augustan pontifices. But the _decoration_, though not
the structure of those arches, they owed to another race,[15] whose
words they stole without understanding, though three centuries before,
the Saxon understood, and used, to express the most solemn majesty of
his Kinghood,--

"EGO, EDGAR, TOTIVS ALBIONIS"--

not Rex, that would have meant the King of Kent or Mercia, not of
England,--no, nor Imperator; that would have meant only the profane
power of Rome, but _BASILEVS_, meaning a King who reigned with sacred
authority given by Heaven and Christ.

[Footnote 14: Of Oxford, during the afternoon service.]

[Footnote 15: See the concluding section of the lecture.]

With far meaner thoughts, both of themselves and their powers, the
Normans set themselves to build impregnable military walls, and
sublime religious ones, in the best possible practical ways; but
they no more made books of their church fronts than of their bastion
flanks; and cared, in the religion they accepted, neither for its
sentiments nor its promises, but only for its immediate results on
national order.

As I read them, they were men wholly of this world, bent on doing the
most in it, and making the best of it that they could;--men, to their
death, of _Deed_, never pausing, changing, repenting, o