It was my endeavour, in the preceding lecture, to vindicate the
thoughts and arts of our Saxon ancestors from whatever scorn might lie
couched under the terms applied to them by Dean Stanley,--'fantastic'
and 'childish.' To-day my task must be carried forward, first, in
asserting the grace in fantasy, and the force in infancy, of the
English mind, before the Conquest, against the allegations contained
in the final passage of Dean Stanley's description of the first
founded Westminster; a passage which accepts and asserts, more
distinctly than any other equally brief statement I have met with,
the to my mind extremely disputable theory, that the Norman invasion
was in every respect a sanitary, moral, and intellectual blessing to
England, and that the arrow which slew her Harold was indeed the Arrow
of the Lord's deliverance.

"The Abbey itself," says Dean Stanley,--"the chief work of the
Confessor's life,--was the portent of the mighty future. When Harold
stood beside his sister Edith, on the day of the dedication, and
signed his name with hers as witness to the Charter of the Abbey, he
might have seen that he was sealing his own doom, and preparing for
his own destruction. The solid pillars, the ponderous arches, the huge
edifice, with triple tower and sculptured stones and storied windows,
that arose in the place and in the midst of the humble wooden churches
and wattled tenements of the Saxon period, might have warned the
nobles who were present that the days of their rule were numbered,
and that the _avenging, civilizing, stimulating_ hand of another and a
mightier race was at work, which would change the whole face of their
language, their manners, their Church, and their commonwealth. The
Abbey, so far exceeding the demands of the _dull and stagnant_ minds
of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, was founded not only in faith, but in