"I looked: aside the dust-cloud rolled,—— The Waster seemed the Builder too; Upspringing from the ruined Old I saw the New." —WHITTIER. It will be clearly seen that there is great apparent disproportion between certain parts of this sketch of the rise and growth of the Norman people. I have not set aside the truth that Normandy was not reunited to France until 1204, and I do not forget that many years lie between that date and the time when I close my account of the famous duchy. But the story of the growth of the Normans gives one the key to any later part of their history, and I have contented myself with describing the characters of the first seven dukes and Eadward the Confessor, who were men typical of their time and representative of the various types of national character. Of the complex questions in civic and legal history I am not competent to speak, nor does it seem to me that they properly enter into such a book as this. With Mr. Freeman's learned and exhaustive work at hand as a book of reference, the readers of this story of Normandy will find all their puzzles solved. [Pg360] But I hope that I have made others see the Normans as I have seen them, and grow as interested in their fortunes as I have been. They were the foremost people of their time, being most thoroughly alive and quickest to see where advances might be made in government, in architecture, in social life. They were gifted with sentiment and with good taste, together with fine physical strength and intellectual cleverness. In the first hundred years of the duchy they made perhaps as rapid progress in every way, and had as signal influence among their contemporaries, as any people of any age,—unless it is ourselves, the people of the young republic of the United States, who might be called the Normans of modern times. For with many of the gifts and many of the weaknesses (and dangers, too) of our viking ancestry, we have repeated the rapid increase of power which was a characteristic of our Norman kindred; we have conquered in many fights with the natural forces of the universe where they fought, humanity against humanity. Much of what marked the Northman and the Norman marks us still.