Page:Pleasures of England (1888).djvu/93

 used, to express the most solemn majesty of his Kinghood,—

"EGO EDGAR, TOTIVS ALBIONIS"—

not Rex, that would have meant the King of Kent or Mercia, not of England,—no, nor Imperator; that would have meant only the profane power of Rome, but BASILEVS, meaning a King who reigned with sacred authority given by Heaven and Christ.

With far meaner thoughts, both of themselves and their powers, the Normans set themselves to build impregnable military walls, and sublime religious ones, in the best possible practical ways; but they no more made books of their church fronts than of their bastion flanks; and cared, in the religion they accepted, neither for its sentiments nor its promises, but only for its immediate results on national order.

As I read them, they were men wholly of this world, bent on doing the most in it, and making the best of it that they could;—men, to their death, of Deed, never pausing, changing, repenting, or anticipating, more than the completed square,, 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