Page:Pleasures of England (1888).djvu/105

 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 Ægina; 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 of the field of Himera)? Well, the main meaning is that though the Normans could build, they couldn't carve, and were wise enough not to try to, when they couldn't, as you do now all over this intensely comic and tragic town: but, here in England, they only employed the Saxon with a grudge, and therefore being more and more driven to use barren mouldings without sculpture, gradually developed the structural forms of archivolt, which breaking into the lancet, brighten and balance themselves into the symmetry of early English Gothic.