Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/232



F the widely separated lands which made up the greater Normandy of the Middle Ages, none have drifted farther apart than Norman England and Norman Sicily. Founded about the same time and not greatly different in area, these states have lost all common traditions, until the history of the southern Normans seems remote, in time as in space, from their kinsmen of the north. With the widening of the historical field, southern Italy and Sicily no longer occupy, as in Mediterranean days, the centre of the historic stage, and the splendor of their early history has been dimmed by earthquake and fever, by economic distress, and by the debasing traditions of centuries of misrule. Neither in language nor race nor political traditions does England recognize relationship between the country of the Black Hand and the 'mother of parliaments.' Yet if the English world has lost the feeling of kinship for the people of the south, it has not lost feeling for the land. It was no mere reminiscence of 'Vergilian headlands' and the thunders of the Odyssey that drew Shelley to the Bay of Naples, Browning to Sorrento, or, to take a parallel example elsewhere,