of drawing animals or figures;--the Saxons and Franks having enough
capacity in that kind, but no thought of attempting it; the Normans
and Lombards still farther remote from any such skill. More and more,
it seems to me wonderful that under your British block-temple, grimly
extant on its pastoral plain, or beside the first crosses engraved on
the rock at Whithorn--you English and Scots do not oftener consider
what you might or could have come to, left to yourselves.

Next, let us form the list of your tutor nations, in whom, it
generally pleases you to look at nothing but the corruptions. If we
could get into the habit of thinking more of our own corruptions and
more of _their_ virtues, we should have a better chance of learning
the true laws alike of art and destiny. But, the safest way of all, is
to assure ourselves that true knowledge of any thing or any creature
is only of the good of it; that its nature and life are in that, and
that what is diseased,--that is to say, unnatural and mortal,--you
must cut away from it in contemplation, as you would in surgery.

Of the six tutor nations, two, the Tuscan and Arab, have no effect on
early Christian England. But the Roman, Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian
act together from the earliest times; you are to study the influence
of Rome upon England in Agricola, Constantius, St. Benedict, and
St. Gregory; of Greece upon England in the artists of Byzantium and
Ravenna; of Syria and Egypt upon England in St. Jerome, St. Augustine,
St. Chrysostom, and St. Athanase.

St. Jerome, in central Bethlehem; St. Augustine, Carthaginian by
birth, in truth a converted Tyrian, Athanase, Egyptian, symmetric
and fixed as an Egyptian aisle; Chrysostom, golden mouth of all;
these are, indeed, every one teachers of all the western world, but