She is a chimera among nations, and one knows not whether to admire most the valour of Guiscard, the virtue of St. Louis, or the villainy of his brother.
53. The Eastern powers—Greek, Israelite, Saracen—are at once the enemies of the Western, their prey, and their tutors.
They bring them methods of ornament and of merchandize, and stimulate in them the worst conditions of pugnacity, bigotry, and rapine.
That is the broad geographical and political relation of races. Next, you must consider the conditions of their time.
54. I told you, in my second lecture on Engraving,[1] that before the twelfth century the nations were too savage to be Christian, and after the fifteenth too carnal to be Christian.
The delicacy of sensation and refinements of imagination necessary to understand Christianity belong to the mid period when men risen from a life of brutal hardship are not yet fallen to one of brutal luxury. You can neither comprehend the character of Christ while you are chopping flints for tools, and gnawing raw bones for food; nor when you have ceased to
- ↑ "Ariadne Florentina," § 66.
