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."
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,[1] 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,[2]whose words they stole without understanding, though three centuries before, the Saxon understood, and
