Of the widely separated lands which made up the greater Normandy of the Middle Ages, none have drifted farther apart than Norman England and Norman Sicily. Founded about the same time and not greatly different in area, these states have lost all common traditions, until the history of the southern Normans seems remote, in time as in space, from their kinsmen of the north. With the widening of the historical field, southern Italy and Sicily no longer occupy, as in Mediterranean days, the centre of the historic stage, and the splendor of their early history has been dimmed by earthquake and fever, by economic distress, and by the debasing traditions of centuries of misrule. Neither in language nor race nor political traditions does England recognize relationship between the country of the Black Hand and the ‘mother of parliaments.’ Yet if the English world has lost the feeling of kinship for the people of the south, it has not lost feeling for the land. It was no mere reminiscence of ‘Vergilian headlands’ and the thunders of the Odyssey that drew Shelley to the Bay of Naples, Browning to Sorrento, or, to take a parallel example elsewhere, Goethe to the glowing orange-groves of Palermo. And it is not alone the poet whose soul responds to A castle, precipice-encurled, In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine; or A sea-side house to the farther South, Where the baked cicala dies of drouth, And one sharp tree--’tis a cypress--stands. No land of the western Mediterranean has burnt itself so deeply into the imagination and sentiment of the English-speaking peoples. Twice has this vivid land of the south played a leading part in the world’s life and thought, once under the Greeks, of “wind-swift thought and city-founding mind,” as we may read in the marbles of Pæstum and Selinus and in the deathless pages of Thucydides; and a second time under the Norman princes and their Hohenstaufen successors, creators of an extraordinarily vigorous and precocious state and a brilliant cosmopolitan culture. If our interest in this brief period of Sicilian greatness be not Norman, it is at least human, as in one of the culminating points of Mediterranean civilization. * * * * *