n, 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.[21]

[Footnote 21: 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.]

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.

In 1874, I went to see Etna, Scylla, Charybdis, and the tombs of the
Norman Kings at Palermo; surprised, as you may imagine, to find that
there wasn't a stroke nor a notion of Norman work in them. They are,
every atom, done by Greeks, and are as pure Greek as the temple of
AEgina; but more rich and refined. I drew with accurate care, and
with measured profile of every moulding, the tomb built for Roger
II. (afterwards Frederick II. was laid in its dark porphyry). And it
is a perfect type of the Greek-Christian form of tomb--temple over
sarcophagus, in which the pediments rise gradually, as time goes on,
into acute angles--get pierced in the gable with foils, and their
sculptures thrown outside on their flanks, and become at last in the
fourteenth century, the tombs of Verona. But what is the meaning of
the Normans employing these Greek slaves for their work in Sicily
(within thirty miles