There is a curious parallelism in this respect between the buildings of ancient Greece, of Etruria, and of England. In Greece we find clear proofs of the architectural style having been founded on timber construction, though the Cyclopean walls, etc., of the primæval cities (whether the works of the same or a different race) forbid the thought that the use of stone was ever unknown. In Etruria we find no less gigantic walls, though we learn from Vitruvius that timber entered largely even into the construction of their temples, and suggested the peculiarities of the Tuscan order. If, then, in Saxon England we find the words “_to build_” to be derived from _timber_;--if we learn from early writers that the majority of their buildings were of wood; and if we find in their stone buildings indications of their imitating the construction of timber framing, we need no more conclude that our forefathers were ignorant of stone building, where it was needful, than that the early Greeks or Etrurians used timber from ignorance of the use of stone. They were colonists, though conquerors. They were, no doubt, but very partially civilised; and, settling down as strangers in a country from which they had driven out the old inhabitants, and whose towns they had in great measure destroyed, they were likely (as colonists do in our own day) to make the largest use of the material most ready to their hand, and to defer to more settled times the use of a more permanent manner of building. The paucity of remains of buildings of the period between the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West and the eleventh century, is by no means peculiar to our own country. Throughout Northern Europe the same fact prevails. The earlier waves of northern invaders were absorbed in the old civilisation, but each successive wave made a deeper and a deeper inroad into the remaining arts of the old world. It was natural then, that, on the return of art and civilisation, the works of this dark period should be deemed unworthy of preservation, and were replaced by new erections. In our own country the Romans had not been overcome, but had simply withdrawn, so that the dissolution of art was a more rapid work than in most other parts of the old empire, while the early efforts of the Saxons were over and over again destroyed by the yet uncivilised and unchristianised Scandinavians, from the last of whose devastations there was hardly time to recover before the Anglo-Saxon monarchy was overthrown by the Normans. No wonder, then, that the conquerors, though but then become adepts in architecture themselves, should disdainfully reconstruct nearly all the churches and greater edifices of their predecessors in that new manner of building in which they had been so recently instructed, and for the carrying out of which their conquest had supplied them with such ample means.