The Norman Romanesque was produced in no one instance before the year 1050, and before 1150 it was entirely superseded. Indeed, all the great typical examples were executed during the last half of the eleventh century. The arrangements of these are more like the Rhenish basilicas than any others, and yet do they differ from them by many degrees of superiority. They formed the last stage in the progress toward consummate invention; and the western façade of Saint Stephens, at Caen, for example, may be regarded as the prototype of all the Gothic cathedrals which immediately succeeded. All this was produced in the fitting order of time and place. For eight centuries the Northmen continued to press toward lower latitudes, everywhere disseminating their hardy habits, pure ethics, deep sentiments of freedom, and superior impress of art. Lombards redeemed Italy, Goths ennobled Spain, Franks cultivated Gaul, and, at the needful moment, William the Conqueror was made ready to transfer all the glorious accumulation of civilizing elements to Saxon England. Ecclesiastical architecture especially reflected one pervading dominant sentiment of the Norman mind--perpetuity. They excelled all nations in the use and ornamentation of the circular arch. Centuries before Christ this had existed, and was by the dull Roman subordinated to mechanical necessities, when he would support his stupendous works; but hitherto it had been applied to base purposes only. That line which the sun and stars trace in their course, the holy shape of the majestic vault of heaven, the Teuton found debased to ignoble purposes, and, rescuing it from the fosse, the aqueduct, and the sudarium, he bent it in consecrated granite above his reverent head, a copy of the arch under which his fathers prayed--the sky. And this rugged Christian art which, with the brain and heart of grand Norman prelates, passes into England, is the introduction of a new principle altogether from the florid Byzantine element at the same time approaching from the opposite point. The one is the product of a mind whose dominant faculties were reason and faith; the other projected by a fervid imagination, bearing in its shape internal evidence of its birthplace, the South; beautiful indeed, but earthly in its beauty, and in the effect it produces on the soul, according well with the dreamy habits of the Saracen, but inappropriate for the uses of that religion which "casteth down imaginations."