single man, unarmed, against three thousand Norman knights, captained by Robert Guiscard!
A day of deeds, gentlemen, to some purpose,—that 18th of June, anyhow.
Here, in the historical account of Norman character, I must unwillingly stop for to-day—because, as you choose to spend your University money in building ball-rooms instead of lecture-rooms, I dare not keep you much longer in this black hole, with its nineteenth century ventilation. I try your patience—and tax your breath—only for a few minutes more in drawing the necessary corollaries respecting Norman art.[1]
How far the existing British nation owes its military prowess to the blood of Normandy and Anjou, I have never examined its genealogy enough to tell you;—but this I can tell you positively, that whatever constitutional order or personal valour the Normans enforced or taught among the nations they conquered, they did not at first attempt with their own hands to rival them in any of their finer arts, but used both Greek and Saxon sculptors, either as slaves, or hired workmen, and more or less therefore chilled and degraded the hearts of the men thus set to servile, or at best, hireling, labour.
- ↑ Given at much greater length in the lecture, with diagrams from Iffley and Poictiers, without which the text of them would be unintelligible. The sum of what I said was a strong assertion of the incapacity of the Normans for any but the rudest and most grotesque sculpture,—Poictiers being, on the contrary, examined and praised as Gallic-French—not Norman.
