If it be an inferior achievement, yet it is something to say that to the same race we owe the fortalice of the middle ages—the parent of the modern fortress. The castle, as we know it in romance and history, is essentially a Norman creation. The symmetrical external strength, and the gloomy mysteries of the interior, necessary to make a castle be a castle in poetry or romance, are features entirely belonging to the Norman edifice. The vaulted form of internal roofing, with all its grandeur and gloom—the dungeons beneath—the battlements above—the secret passages—and other mysteries which are necessarily connected with these in architectural arrangement, are all peculiarities of the Norman fortalice. To find what there is in this, inquire how _The Old English Baron_—_The Castle of Otranto_—Mrs Radcliffe’s or Victor Hugo’s novels could have been written without this element of poetic romance. Go higher up, and see how much of the glorious interest of Scott’s novels has been created out of this element; and whether it is presented at Torquelstone or Tillytudlem, all comes of Norman origin. But go still higher, and see how such a tragedy as Macbeth could have existed, if Shakespeare had been a contemporary of the Scottish monarch, and had been bound to describe him living in an extensive craal of wicker or turf huts, instead of placing the whole tragic history in one of those mysterious Norman castles which did not exist until centuries after Macbeth’s day, and were beginning to add to their other interest that of a mellow age in Shakespeare’s. Besides these elements of associative interest, there is the external beauty involved in a marvellous development of strength and symmetry. Take the Norman castle in its most perfect development—the stern square mass in the centre—the flanking round towers at the angles, widening with a graceful sweep towards the earth, after the manner in which the oak stem widens to its root—the varied crest of battlements, turrets, and machicolations which crown all, adjusting their outline to the graceful variations of the square and circular works below,—all make a combination, the grandeur and beauty of which has been attested by its eternal repetition in landscape-painting, since landscape-painting began. Nor were the beauty and grandeur all that the Norman fortalice could boast of. It was a great achievement in science. Of all the steps taken onwards in fortification, from the primitive earthwork on the steppes of Tartary down to the fortification of Paris, the greatest was taken by that one which combined together the dwelling-house and the fortress, and made that organisation of main edifice and flanking protections of which the great works of Vauban were but a further development, as we shall have occasion more fully to show.