But we must stop here.—External beauty and grandeur, engineering skill, we attribute to the Norman castle; but we cannot award the same praise to its moral objects, which were ever those of subjugation and regal or lordly despotism. In fact, the castle was the embodiment of the feudal system, and ripened into the Parisian Bastille, the largest and most perfect Norman fortress ever built. As one of our kings said of a border keep, the man who built that was a thief in his heart; and they who reared the stately dwellings of the Norman kings and nobles had subjugation and tyranny in their hearts, and indeed embodied these qualities in mason-work; for, after all, these gloomy edifices owe a mighty portion of their influence to that overawing quality which Burke made out to be the source of sublimity. If all admiration of artistic achievement in architecture must depend on the honourableness, the faithfulness, the humaneness of those who were the designers, we fear we would need to abandon our favourite edifices as structural lies, and architectural shams, only fit to be cast into oblivion, and there obtain Christian burial. But so callous are we in the matter of the faith and morality of designers, that we can even confess that the exterior structure so well fitted for defence against an oppressed peasantry, and the dreary dungeons so well fitted for feudal vengeance, when these were driven desperate, only raise our interest by a contemplation of their objects; while the assurance that some murder has been committed within the gloomy recesses—the baser and more brutal the better—simply affords additional zest to the tragic interest of the whole. Let us cast a glance back to the condition of the art of fortification, at the time when it was taken up by these Normans. The most truly primitive forts are naturally decided by antiquaries to be those which are found constructed solely out of the native materials which the site may have afforded. In this matter time has been by no means impartial to the handiwork of man; since, in some places it remains, and is likely to remain, so long as the crust of the earth keeps together: while in others, the stronghold of the dwellers in vast watery wastes and swamps has melted away with the mud of which it may have been originally formed. So, in the swamps of Friesland, defended in the dawn of history as they were in the seventeenth century, and in the flats of Lincoln, defended against the Normans, many a place of strength has departed; but on the tops of barren hills the rude stone circles remain, the relics of some utterly unknown antiquity.