Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/242

Rh uniformity of ugliness most admirably keeps down any symptoms of the prodigal luxuriance of beauty.

We must, however, carefully beware of founding any theory, from the existence of these potteries, that the Forest must therefore have been cultivated in the days of the Conqueror. The reason why the Romans chose the Forest is obvious,—not from its fertility, but because it supplied the wood to fire the kilns; the same cause which, centuries after, made Yarranton select Ringwood for his smelting-furnaces. We must, too, bear in mind that after the Romans abandoned the island the natives soon went back to their primitive state of semi-barbarism; and further, that the interval between the Roman occupation and the Norman Conquest was nearly as great as that between ourselves and the Conqueror—a period long enough for the Kelts, and West-Saxons, and Danes to have swept away in their feuds all traces of civilization.

But what we should see in them is that beauty of form, which in simple outline has seldom been excelled, proclaiming a people who should in their descendants be the future masters of Art, as then they were of warfare.

The history of a nation may be plainer read by its manufactures than by its laws or constitution. Its true aesthetic life, too, should be determined not so much by its list 224