"As soon as they were established on the soil, these barbarians became the most hardy and active builders. Within the space of a century and a half, they had covered the country on which they had definitely landed, with religious, monastic, and civil edifices, of an extent and richness then little common. It is difficult to suppose that they had brought from Norway the elements of art,[13] but they were possessed by a persisting and penetrating spirit; their brutal force did not want for grandeur. Conquerors, they raised castles to assure their domination; they soon recognized the Moral force of the clergy, and endowed it richly. Eager always to attain their end, when once they saw it, they _never left one of their enterprises unfinished_, and in that they differed completely from the Southern inhabitants of Gaul. Tenacious extremely, they were perhaps the only ones among the barbarians established in France who had ideas of order; the only ones who knew how to preserve their conquests, and compose a state. They found the remains of the Carthaginian arts on the territory where they planted themselves, they mingled with those their national genius, positive, grand, and yet supple." [Footnote 13: They _had_ brought some, of a variously Charybdic, Serpentine, and Diabolic character.--J.R.] Supple, 'Delié,'--capable of change and play of the mental muscle, in the way that savages are not. I do not, myself, grant this suppleness to the Norman, the less because another sentence of M. le Duc's, occurring incidentally in his account of the archivolt, is of extreme counter-significance, and wide application. "The Norman arch," he says, "is _never derived from traditional classic forms_, but only from mathematical arrangement of line." Yes; that is true: the Norman arch is never derived from classic forms. The cathedral,[14] whose aisles you saw or might have seen, yesterday, interpenetrated with light, whose vaults you might have heard prolonging the sweet divisions of majestic sound, would have been built in that stately symmetry by Norman law, though never an arch at Rome had risen round her field of blood,--though never her Sublician bridge had been petrified by her Augustan pontifices. But the _decoration_, though not the structure of those arches, they owed to another race,[15] whose words they stole without understanding, though three centuries before, the Saxon understood, and used, to express the most solemn majesty of his Kinghood,-- "EGO, EDGAR, TOTIVS ALBIONIS"-- not Rex, that would have meant the King of Kent or Mercia, not of England,--no, nor Imperator; that would have meant only the profane power of Rome, but _BASILEVS_, meaning a King who reigned with sacred authority given by Heaven and Christ. [Footnote 14: Of Oxford, during the afternoon service.] [Footnote 15: See the concluding section of the lecture.]