er word for
stiffness and sterility to call it Stamboulish. But for the Moslems
and other men of the Near East what counted about Byzantium was
that it still inherited the huge weight of the name of Rome.
Rome had come east and reared against them this Roman city,
and though and priest or soldier who came out of it might be
speaking as a Greek, he was ruling as a Roman. Its critics in
these days of criticism may regard it as a corrupt civilisation.
But its enemies in the day of battle only regarded it as civilisation.
Saladin, the greatest of the Saracens, did not call Greek bishops
degenerate dreamers or dingy outcasts, he called them, with a
sounder historical instinct, "The monks of the imperial race."
The survival of the word merely means that even when the imperial
city fell behind them, they did not surrender their claim
to defy all Asia in the name of the Christian Emperor.
That is but one example out of twenty, but that is why in this
distant place to this day the Greeks who are separated from the see
of Rome sometimes bear the strange name of "The Romans."

Now that civilisation is our civilisation, and we never had any other.
We have not inherited a Teutonic culture any more than a Druid culture;
not half so much. The people who say that parliaments or pictures
or gardens or roads or universities were made by the Teutonic
race from the north can be disposed of by the simple question:
why did not the Teutonic race make them in the north?
Why was not the Parthenon originally built in the neighbourhood
of Potsdam, or did ten Hansa towns compete to be the birthplace
of Homer? Perhaps they do by this time; but their local illusion
is no longer largely shared. Anyhow it seems strange that the roads
of the Romans should be due to the inspiration of the Teutons;
and that parliaments should begin in Spain because they came
from Germany. If I looked about in these parts for a local emblem
like that of the eagle, I might very well find it in the lion.
The lion is common enough, of course, in Christian art both
hagiological and heraldic. Besides the cavern of Bethlehem of which I
shall speak presently, is the cavern of St. Jerome, where he lived
with that real or legendary lion who was drawn by the delicate
humour of Carpaccio and a hundred other religious painters.
That it should appear in Christian art is natural; that it should
appear in Moslem art is much more singular, seeing that Moslems
are in theory forb