r anticipating,
more than the completed square, [Greek: 'aneu psogou], of their
battle, their keep, and their cloister. Soldiers before and after
everything, they learned the lockings and bracings of their stones
primarily in defence against the battering-ram and the projectile, and
esteemed the pure circular arch for its distributed and equal strength
more than for its beauty. "I believe again," says M. le Duc,[16] "that
the feudal castle never arrived at its perfectness till after the
Norman invasion, and that this race of the North was the first to
apply a defensive system under unquestionable laws, soon followed by
the nobles of the Continent, after they had, at their own expense,
learned their superiority."

[Footnote 16: Article "Chateau," vol. iii, p. 65.]

The next sentence is a curious one. I pray your attention to it. "The
defensive system of the Norman is born of a profound sentiment of
_distrust_ and _cunning, foreign to the character of the Frank_."
You will find in all my previous notices of the French, continual
insistance upon their natural Franchise, and also, if you take the
least pains in analysis of their literature down to this day, that
the idea of falseness is to them indeed more hateful than to any other
European nation. To take a quite cardinal instance. If you compare
Lucian's and Shakespeare's Timon with Moliere's Alceste, you will find
the Greek and English misanthropes dwell only on men's _ingratitude_
to _themselves_, but Alceste, on their _falsehood to each other_.

Now hear M. le Duc farther:

"The castles built between the tenth and twelfth centuries along the
Loire, Gironde, and Seine, that is to say, along the lines of the
Norman invasions, and in the neighbourhood of their possessions, have
a peculiar and uniform character which one finds neither in central
France, nor in Burgundy, nor can there be any need for us to throw
light on (_faire ressortir_) the superiority of the warrior spirit
of the Normans, during the later times of the Carlovingian epoch,
over the spirit of the chiefs of Frank descent, established on the
Gallo-Roman soil." There's a bit of honesty in a Frenchman for you!

I have just said that they valued religion chiefly for its influence
of order in the present world: being in this, observe, as nearly as
may be the exact reverse of modern believers, or persons who profess
to be such,--of whom it may be generally alleged, too truly, that they
value religion with