My last lecture was rather antiquarian and historical than instructive in any principles of art. It showed you how the Celtic inhabitants of Ireland and Scotland worked out for themselves,--upon Romano-British reminiscences, added to those of their own race,--a manner of building which, though severely simple, was by no means to be despised; and also how our own Anglo-Saxon forefathers went through a similar process, working partly on the same foundations, but more directly on lessons brought to them from Italy, though not always very well understood. I might further have shown you (had it been my subject) how that both of these races were far more successful in the more delicate arts of embroidery, illuminated painting, and jewellery; and how little in their practice of those decorative arts they trusted to any but their own traditions. I am not sure, too, whether in sculpture the pre-Norman English may not have succeeded better than in architecture,--quaint and untechnical though their productions were. I fear, however, that we must admit that, in our own particular art of architecture, we have little to learn from their buildings, however interesting and quaintly picturesque; and that, though belonging to a branch of the great round-arched family, they fail--almost of all effort, certainly of any success--in developing that manner of building into a style of art. That fearful deluge, whose destructive waves swept with such overwhelming fury over our land after the decease of the last--the sainted--monarch of England’s older dynasty, may be likened to the sudden breaking down of its banks by some mighty river, which, while it sweeps from the earth the crops and the homesteads, leaving nothing but devastation on its track, yet deposits, in subsiding, a film of foreign substance upon the deluged soil, which adds to it a new productiveness, and, in time, far more than compensates for the loss and havoc which accompanied it. So it was (at the least with architecture), after the Norman conquest. The old manner of building which, during a course of nearly five centuries, had failed to generate any development of a truly artistic character, was swept once and for ever from the face of the earth, so much so that some have denied its very existence; but there was substituted for it a style which, if at first little less rude than its predecessor, contained within itself the germs of a thoroughly sound artistic system, which speedily germinated into a series of developments, the most glorious which, perhaps, man has ever yet seen. We have the clearest evidence, both from the statements of old writers, and such as we derive from our own observation, that the style of building introduced into England by the Normans, was viewed as a distinctly new one--a “_novum genus compositionis_,” and in no degree as a development of that which preceded it in this country.